Collections
by Silver Sky 1138
Summary: Very short stories from across the Star Wars universe. 148. Anakin Skywalker is no longer a slave.
1. Wonder

Authors' Note: We take requests for drabbles. Really, between the two of us, we can cover pretty much any topic.

* * *

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: Drama/Romance

Characters/Pairings: Anakin/Padmé

**Wonder**

She wonders where he is, what he's doing, whether the moon is as beautiful on whatever planet he's on as it is over Coruscant, whether it's even night where he is.

Civil war is a dangerous time to think. Over analyzing has left her awake on other nights before this. That's why she prefers the term wonder. Wonder sounds more like a dream.

She wonders what she'll say to him when he comes back. She wonders what words she'll use to tell him.

And then, pausing briefly to lay a hand over her stomach, she wonders if he already knows.


	2. Solid Ground

Word Count: 97

Rating: K

Genre: General/Tragedy

Characters/Pairings: Leia

**Solid Ground**

No one ever expects an entire planet to blow up. Lots of things explode: X-Wings; marshmallows in a microwave; bits of the _Millenium Falcon_ when Han needs it least. But she couldn't believe that a machine existed which could spear through a planet, shatter it like glass tossed to the floor. She couldn't believe it when she stood on the Death Star.

The Empire had sheathed its superlaser in a space station. People worked while it killed cultures. The irony sickened her, but she always lay awake thinking about it.

She never entirely trusted solid ground again.


	3. Breathe

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Darth Vader

**Breathe**

Without his mask, he cannot breathe. Luke's face swims in and out of focus before him. But the more blurred that image becomes, the clearer he can hear the voice inside his head.

_Anakin…_

He hasn't heard that name in so long. The voice, too, is a relic of the past.

_Master…_ But he cannot seize the air to form the word. He struggles to hold on to the world. No one really wants to die. _Help me…_

The response is ancient Jedi wisdom. _You have to breathe deeply before you slip under the water._

He breathes.

And slips away.


	4. Unattainable

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: General/Romance

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan (hints of Obidala)

**Unattainable**

If he were not a Jedi, he thinks he could have loved her. She was beautiful, and kind, and above all else she was unattainable.

Nonattachment is the hardest lesson he's ever had to learn. But after losing Qui-Gon, he finally understands.

This is why he cannot love Padmé Amidala, even though he would have liked to. He does not want to give another part of himself away when he knows that he can never get it back.

This is why he swears to train Anakin Skywalker. He is still young, still trusting. Someone has to teach him about nonattachment.


	5. A New Hope

**Word count: 75**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Not angst…depressing? (Or, according to ArgenteusDraco, "very thought provoking".)**

**Character: Luke**

A New Hope

Luke Skywalker stands beneath the trees of Endor and smiles as the ghosts fade. The magic, to him, has come back to the world. He imagines the Jedi academy he will create.

He does not know how thankful he should be that no precognition comes to him at this moment.

He does not know how many times he will wish the Force was a deity so that he could curse its decisions.

So he is happy.


	6. His Last Fairytale

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: General…"thought provoking"…**

**Characters: Obi-Wan and Anakin (not slash)**

His Last Fairy Tale

"One day a deity married a mortal. Sit down, Anakin, you have to hear this. They married, but they didn't understand each other when they spoke about some things. She, the mortal, would ask him what his power was like. Like a blaster set on 'stun' in your hand, he would say. Like freefall. Like the fire that opens seedpods. She died trying to understand him. Do you see, Anakin?"

"What about two deities?"

"I think most deities would have too much to do, what with running the universe, to think of the marriage type of love."

"Of course, master."


	7. Mistakes

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Qui-Gon and Yoda

**Mistakes**

This was not the first boy to be brought to the Temple later in life. When Yoda looked at him, he did not see Anakin Skywalker, who dreamed of becoming a Jedi Knight.

He saw the face of Xanatos, the boy who had betrayed the Order. They could not take the risk of training another Xanatos.

Qui-Gon could see his former Padawn in Anakin too. But unlike Yoda, he didn't see the possibility of Anakin falling. He didn't want to consider that Anakin's past would keep him from ever being a dedicated Jedi.

He wanted a second chance at teaching.


	8. Kit and the Chair

**Word Count: 225**

**Rating: G**

**Genre: Humor, Not Actually A Drabble**

**Character(s): Kit Fisto**

The Oh-So-Serious Tale of Kit and the Council Chair

The Jedi Council Chamber is revered, feared. It is the eyes looking down upon the Padawans. It is untouchable. Twelve unique chairs, almost serene themselves by association, sit in a circle at the top of the Council tower. Kit Fisto imagines each Jedi Master sitting in his or her chair. He counts.

To his great joy, there's one left over, no matter how many times he counts. (There are two left, actually, when he mistakenly forgets Master Yarael Poof, but he corrects that.) He can barely comprehend that that chair is for him.

He circles the chamber, scenting each almost omniscient Jedi. Master Yoda, Master Kun, Master Allie…Untouchable. Just a moment ago they told him of their decision—he was shocked—and let him enter the Council chamber alone to commune with the Force and attune to the chamber itself.

So blasted serious! The Nautolan smiles. _They put me on the Council—let's see what I can make of it!_

Master Kit Fisto finds his own chair—it's shaped for him, and it doesn't smell like anyone else. He jumps, lands on the back of the chair on his hands, walks a few steps upside down, and back flips into the seat. He grins.

He imagines that the Jedi Order will never be the same again.


	9. TIE Fighter

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: Tragedy/Adventure

Characters/Pairings: Han Solo

**TIE Fighter**

A battle in space is different from those on land. What most recruits fail to grasp is that space is so _big_ that it's difficult to get your bearings. You can't see the rest of your formation except as a blip on the control screen, and the blackness closes around you until your vision narrows to just you and one other pilot.

The other problem with the vastness of space is that even after you emerge victorious from your dogfight, you don't realize until later that, alone on the other side of the moon, you are your squadron's sole survivor.


	10. Different

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: Introspection/Humor

Characters/Pairings: Mace Windu

**Different**

He was the last of his year-mates to build his lightsaber, and everyone, including some of his friends' teachers, was anxious to see what he'd waited so long for.

They lined up, each Padawan standing before their Master, weapons in their hands. The hilts looked remarkably similar, but only at first glance.

One by one, the blades ignited. Blue, blue, green, green, green, blue, green… violet…

He could feel everyone's stares go instantly to his blade. _Yeah. It's purple. And it's going to _own_ you!_

But he didn't say that, because it wasn't very Jedi-like.

Even if it was true.


	11. Death of a Master

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: G**

**Genre: Tragedy**

**Character(s): Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan**

_Note 1: This is NOT about a slash pairing._

_Note 2: The inspiration for this ficlet came when my friend (who doesn't even like Star Wars) was watching episode 1 and noted that Star Wars tended not to be about human emotion but about galactic-scale battling. I thought that was fine, but in the case of Qui-Gon's last words, might his distraught apprentice not have thought t that they were awfully impersonal?_

Death of a Master

The last thing you said to me was not, "You've been a good Padawan." Not even, "I love you," which in its platonic, powerful way was exactly what I was trying to say, but I would have cried on you if I had tried. You said, "Train the boy." All about Anakin, or the fate of the Galactic Republic. Is that the Jedi way, nonattachment, or were you just proud because you found the Chosen One? Were you trying to tell me everything wordlessly, through our splintering Force-bond that I nearly ignored in my single-minded desire for your last _words? _


	12. Children's Games

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: General**

**Characters/Pairings: Anakin Skywalker**

** Children's Games**

A group of younglings gathered in the Temple's main hall, giggling happily as they skipped from tile to tile. Anakin watched them, obviously confused.

Finally, one of them noticed him standing in the doorway. They paused and stared until one of the braver children ventured to wave at him.

"Wanna play with us?" he asked.

Anakin blinked. This was a game?

"C'mon." He guided Anakin onto the black tile. "This one's stone, and all the rest are lava. You gotta jump over the lava."

He demonstrated, and Anakin, after a moment's hesitation, followed suit.

Obi-Wan, watching from the shadows, smiled.


	13. Artistry

**Word Count: 97**

**Rating: PG**

**Genre: Drama/Horror**

**Characters: Darth Sidious, Darth Maul**

Artistry

They left their child to play in the dirt with a plastic speeder, and Darth Sidious took it away.

Such a simple act, reminiscent of tales of ghosts, Anzati, Clawdite changelings, or other pseudoscientific nightmares…

Quiet lethality was needed before the war. The child's mind was a blank slate for Sidious to write upon in arcane script, as his body would be a canvas to ink and needles.

Sidious picked the Zabrak up. It struggled; the Force loosened Sidious' fingers and arm. Sidious tightened his grip and pushed a fold of his robe over the child's face.


	14. Old Habits

**Word Count: 21**

**Rating: PG**

**Genre: Drama/ open to interpretation**

**Characters/Pairing: Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade Skywalker**

Old Habits

"Goodnight, Mara."

"Goodnight, Luke."

She lay beside him and idly wondered how best to break his arms.

Old habits die hard.


	15. Victory

**Word Count: 92**

**Rating: PG-13**

**Genre: Action**

**Characters: Darth Maul, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon**

Victory

Do you know how exciting it is to kill? Hereandnow, blinding saber-light, ozone, stomp, spin, the smell of sweat or its analog. You human Jedi give me a ferocious fight, although your hearts' blood is not in it. You move like sparrows around a hawkbat, but the mind of a predator _will _overwhelm your numbers. I have burnt through your master and left him for me to feel the vitality trickle out. I—

Know dying—

I feel your emotions for one swift moment.

You do know the excitement and the mad joy!


	16. More Mistakes

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: Humor/Tragedy/Drama

Characters/Pairings: Anakin Skywalker & Obi-Wan Kenobi

**More Mistakes**

"Master?" He eases the door partially open.

The Jedi looks up. "What's bothering you, Padawan?"

He slips inside but doesn't meet Obi-Wan's eyes. "I've made a terrible mistake."

"Did you hotwire Master Windu's speeder again?"

"No. Erm, well, that wasn't what I wanted to talk about."

Obi-Wan fixes him with a knowing stare, and Anakin looks down again. "On Tatooine… I found the Tuskens who killed my mother, and… I let my anger take over, Master. I killed them all." Finally, he looks up. "Forgive me."

Obi-Wan looks gravely at his Padawan. But he is the Master, so he forgives.


	17. Hotwiring

Word Count: 99

Rating: K

Genre: Humor

Characters/Pairings: Mace Windu and Anakin Skywalker

**Hotwiring**

Mace Windu was not an expert on speeders. But he was reasonably sure they weren't supposed to spark when you tried to start them.

They also weren't supposed to yelp with fear. So when his speeder did both, his first instinct was to jump out and look underneath.

Sure enough, he found a Padawan crouching there. "Skywalker," he growled, and grabbed for the boy's tunic.

Anakin had no choice but to be lead along by Mace's firm grip. He looked down sheepishly when they reached his Master's door.

"Excuse me," Mace asked a very confused Obi-Wan. "Is this yours?"


	18. Of Stars

Word Count: 96

Rating: K+

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan & Anakin

**Of Stars**

The Padawan stares upward at the heavens. "I miss my mother, Obi-Wan." His gaze shifts to a new set of stars. "She used to tell me that the people we love become stars when they die."

Obi-Wan sighs. "Anakin, you know that stars are just balls of burning gas. And you know that there was nothing you could have done. All things die, Anakin."

Yes, he knows. But he does not wish to let go of his childhood beliefs.

Which is why it pains him all the more when Obi-Wan tells him, "Even stars burn out."


	19. Cold

**Words: 100**

**Rating: G**

**Genre: Drama/Cute**

**Characters/Pairings: Hints of LukeOC **

Cold

The Death Star had been cold in comparison to the corner of Echo Base. Perhaps, Luke Skywalker thought, being a warrior-monk will immune me to physical temperature, and all I will feel will be demeanors. He smiled when he saw a pilot stretched out on the nose of her X-Wing, her cheek pressed against the residual heat of the engines. She's cold, he thought, so he clasped her dangling hand for a moment as he walked by. She looked up, startled by the touch and by the rank of the person it came from. He smiled and moved on, warmer.


	20. Rituals

Word Count: 77

Rating: K

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Luke

**Rituals**

On Tatooine, people buried their dead. It was a sign of respect; the land they rested in became sacred ground. And so he wanted to bury Ben Kenobi.

On Alderaan, there were simply too many people to consider burial sites. Instead, the dead were burned. And so she insisted on a pyre.

It was the first time that Luke would argue with his sister.

Which was silly, really, because there was nothing to bury – or burn – anyway.


	21. What Matters

**Words: 90**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Humor**

**Characters/Pairings: Yoda, Ashla (the Togrunta in the Yoda-trains-younglings scene)**

_Note: I know that the Star Wars galaxy tends to use Metric, but for us Americans it just doesn't evoke the same thing. So, feet, not meters. _

It was quite a realization when Ashla noticed that she was taller than Master Yoda. He had always loomed over the younglings, a bastion of wisdom and attitude. But he was only something like two feet tall, and Ashla was so proud when the med-droid announced her to be 2'3". As Yoda walked down a hallway, Ashla scurried along behind him, trying to get close enough to see over his head.

He turned around. She stopped. "Size matters not, Padawan."

Yoda managed to loom, even though he was only two feet tall.


	22. Namesake

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Drama/Humor**

**Characters/Pairings: OCs**

Namesake

"And Rachel was named after Great-Aunt Rae."

"Who was I named after, mommy?"

"Luke Skywalker. He helped found the Republic."

"Aw, mom, that's boring! History? Yutoe's name means He Who Ate Hot Peppers And Almost Drowned Afterward."

"He's Ubese, yes?"

"Yeah."

"Well. Ubese speak on frequencies we can't hear. In the same way, 'Luke Skywalker' means more than it seems. He is not just an old name in a history lesson. He inspired many to join the Rebellion, or the Jedi if they could…he killed many. That name means responsibility, choices…history."

The child looked confused.

"Go play with Rachel, dear."


	23. Pride After A Fall

**Word Count: 99**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: General (excuse the pun) **

**Characters/Pairings: General Grievous and Count Dooku**

_I must retain some pride._

But determination led to anger lead to oblivion. _What should I be proud of? _ One of his new, bulky, clawed feet caught in the folds of his cloak as he stepped. He quickly turned his foot, to avoid damaging the Kaleesh garment.

_I retain the pride of the Kaleesh. Of the Confederacy? No…Of the…_

He tripped again and this time the cloak tore, sending his foot crashing onto the ground. He hunched over and looked up, confused, as Count Dooku entered the room. "Adjusting, General?"

Grievous nodded, but part of him thought, _Too well._


	24. Just Like Me

**Word Count: 99**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Angst/Tragedy. This can be considered a follow-up to "Solid Ground". **

**Characters/Pairings: Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker**

You destroyed Alderaan. I cried and cried when no one was watching. I wanted to _live _so fiercely, to strike back and avenge them, and you wouldn't let me. I was your captive, and I hated the walls with a dark passion.

I destroyed the Death Star. I didn't fire the missiles, but I commanded the soldiers. Who was there on that station that wanted to live? That saw us as evil? That I murdered?

Luke says you're still alive somewhere. You're caught in your TIE fighter prison, looking for home if you have one. Just like I was.


	25. Rain

Word Count: 101 (…)

Rating: K

Genre: Introspection

Characters/Pairings: A Citizen of Coruscant

**Rain**

I remember the first lesson I ever learned on the streets of Corellia. When the storm clouds gather, it's going to rain.

You never got that kind of warning on Coruscant. If it ever rained there, it rained because someone in a skyscraper office decided that it was a good time to. People would gather around windows to watch the sky grow dark, and all but the most daring pilots left the sky as lightning tore across it, illuminating the outline of the Jedi Temple.

I remember a lot from the days of the Republic.

Mostly, I remember when it rained.


	26. Changes

Word Count:

Rating: K

Genre: Humor/General Snarky-ness

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan and Anakin

**Changes**

"Master?"

"Yes?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

Obi-Wan quickly ticked off his mental checklist, and was unable to come up with any items he might be missing. "I don't think so. Why?"

"You didn't shave. Again."

Obi-Wan blinked. "I did not 'forget to shave,' Anakin, I'm trying to grow a beard."

"Oh," Anakin said. He tilted his head slightly to the left as he looked up at his Master.

Then: "It looks funny."


	27. Sight

Word Count: K

Rating: K

Genre: Drama/Veiled Romance

Characters/Pairings: Potentially Insulting Visas/LSMExile

_This one is for __**HanuuEshe.**_

**Sight**

Visas Marr. _Imperfect eyes. _

"You hesitate to teach me. Why?"

"Because of Malachor. You are a disturbance, a breach in the Force, like the death of populations. For one individual to exude such a shockwave of power is almost unthinkable.

And I have sensed it twice.

Hunger is the absence of substance.

You are unlike my master, despite your common source, in what you choose to fill the void with. He chooses others' deaths. You choose their lives."

"That's kinder, isn't it?"

"It is.

As long as those lives are giving exactly what they want to give."


	28. Boba's Mother

**Words: 88**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Family/Tragedy**

**Characters/Pairings: Boba Fett**

Boba's Mother

Young Boba Fett sometimes dreamed of having a mother . She was, he later realized, a sort of combination of Zam Wesell and Taun We; serious, tall, friendly, and not quite human. They would take walks together, or train along with Jango.

In the period of years which became termed "the dark times", but which fed and equipped Boba Fett quite well, he looked back at his younger self.

His father's death, just as he was beginning to forget his dreams, had made him wish for a mother again.

It had made him wish for a family bigger than his million brothers.


	29. Perceptions

Word Count: 86

Rating: K

Genre: Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Moteé

**Perception**

Most people cannot tell us apart. Some even think we're clones.

We aren't.

Dormé has a scar on the third finger of her left hand, where she burned herself as a child. Versé is actually three centimeters taller than the rest of us. Ellé's earlobes are attached, and her eyes have tiny flecks of green.

Yet any of us could be mistaken for Senator Amidala, and most of us have.

You'd think that people would pay more attention to the details of such an important figure.


	30. Last Stand

Word Count: 99

Rating: K

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Owen Lars

**Last Stand**

Owen Lars preferred a simple life. He did not harbor any decidedly malcontent feelings toward the Empire.

But by the Suns, he was not going to let them invade his home like this!

The moisture farm was where he'd grown up. It was where he'd married Beru, where he'd raised Luke, where he'd buried his father and Shmi.

As he gripped the trigger of his outdated blaster rifle and faced the storm troopers who were dragging his wife outside, he wondered vaguely if, as a Jedi, Anakin had ever known this kind of fierce devotion to home and family.


	31. Steve Palpatine

Word Count: 87

Rating: K

Genre: Humor

Characters/Pairings: Darth Vader, some stormtroopers (probably Tag, Bink, Danson, and Bhiff.../obscure reference)

_A/N: Inspired by wordswithout. To the best of my knowledge, "Xerxes" was in fact the name chosen for George Lucas's antagonist in one of the early drafts of Star Wars. _

Steve Palpatine

As he passed by the barracks, Darth Vader overheard a group of off-duty stormtroopers' heated conversation.

"It's gotta be something regal. Maximillian. Claudius. Xerxes."

"_Xerxes_?!"

"No, no, there's gotta be a reason he always uses a title. I bet it's something embarrassing."

"Or alien."

"Bob Palpatine."

"Steve."

When the laughter died down, the room went silent. Vader allowed himself to be heard as he walked by, then gave the men the illusion of solitude again. Faintly he heard, "I wonder if Darth Vader is his _real _name?"


	32. Birthdays

Word Count:100

Rating: K

Genre: Humor

Characters/Pairings: Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa

Birthdays

Luke came around a corner on Yavin IV to find Leia conferring with General Dodonna. He paused. Dodonna walked away. Luke searched for words. "You were talking about the birth of the Empire. How, ah, how old are you, Leia?"

"Nineteen."

"Really? Heh, me too. I always thought of you as older."

"When is your birthday?"

"The second mist month by Tatooine time…" He smiled sheepishly as he calculated mentally and on his fingers. "That's fifth month, nineteenth day by Coruscant time."

"Really, ha, that's mine too," replied Leia.

They laughed softly, Luke finding that he didn't feel so nervous.


	33. Different Darknesses

**Words: 97**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: General/Tragedy**

**Characters: Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Maul, Xanatos (sorta)**

Different Darknesses

On a certain level, deep below the muscle memory that drives the lightsaber in his hands, Qui-Gon realizes that fighting this Sith Lord is easy.

The Zabrak's connection to the dark side is not Xanatos'; it is rawer, less thought-out. This Sith did no research. He does not know his foe's pasts, fears, alliances, or loves. He deprives himself of a weapon much more effective than his exotic lightsaber. He studied no Dun Möch taunts in preparation for this duel, instead focusing on physical prowess.

_He cannot hurt me_, Qui-Gon thinks, _because we have never met before_.


	34. A Merciful Death

**Note: **Based on the deleted scene from RotS in which Grievous murders Shaak Ti aboard the _Invisible Hand_.

* * *

Word Count: 92 

Rating: K

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Shaak Ti and General Grievous

**A Merciful Death**

You sit on the cold durasteel floor, your robes pooling around your feet in a mockery of the blood you will not spill. Above you, the lights flicker softly. Below, you hear the faint rush of water. Ahead, your comrades approach, though you know they cannot save you. And behind you, your captor stands silently, running mechanical fingers over your head and the side of your face.

Before the Force envelops your spirit, you have just enough time to think, _Who was he before this, that he learned so gentle a gesture?_


	35. Sidious' Strategy

**Words: 100**

**Rating: T**

**Genre: Tragedy/Supernatural**

**Characters: Darth Sidious (Chancellor Palpatine), a bunch of Jedi.**

Sidious' Strategy

Darth Sidious easily defeats the Jedi Order's master swordsmen because he knows their secrets, their treasured thoughts.

To Kit Fisto he shows Aalya Secura, dead, her face and lekku lacerated by blasterbolts.

To Saesee Tiin he shows the roof of the Temple's hanger falling, crashing through the hulls of the sleek starships.

To loyal Agen Kolar he shows the truth: the Jedi Council was always wrong about Anakin Skywalker.

But Mace Windu has no distracting loves held tight in his fists. He disappears into the Force and turns power back on Sidious, searching, like a demolition droid, for a shatterpoint.


	36. Jedi

**Words: 100**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Drama/Humor**

**Characters: Han and Luke**

Jedi

Han knows he's a little addled, mentally and physically, by the carbonite, Leia's garb, and the anticlimactic recapture of the rescue team by Jabba the Sleemo. He's a little slow. So when he finds himself looking at blurry Luke and dully thinking in one word bursts, he knows he has an excuse.

_Backflips? _He thinks.

When he spends time with Luke again, on the Mon Cal cruiser headed for Endor, he's the same kind of shocked.

_Black outfit? Deathly serious?_

Han wonders what happened to make the kid grow up into a warrior the likes of which he's never seen.


	37. Going Extinct

**Word Count: 146**

**Rating: T**

**Genre: Tragedy/Drama/Not actually a drabble**

**Characters: Anakin Skywalker, younglings**

* * *

The Council reminded him of many things, but what surfaced most strongly was the thought of Ki-Adi-Mundi, the Cerean master. He had wives, and offspring, because his species were rare. Anakin could not remember why; they had been struck by war, or radiation, or were simply going extinct, and so Mundi was allowed a family. _I don't know whether he _loves _them, _Vader realized. _It's not _reproduction _that Jedi are forbidden from; it's love. But he was _allowed_--!_

_We're going extinct, _Vader thought. _Humans. The universe. Jedi. Everyone. Heroes. Padme is going to slip into entropy, like our child, like the Republic if it's not shaken up and reformed, even remade. The ones I love will be picked off, selected, unless I become the fittest._

The threat of extinction spurred him to leave the bodies of the children, to re-cross the room, and carry on.


	38. Knowledge

_Written at the request of Pronker._

* * *

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Family

Characters/Pairings: Luke, Leia, Padmé, Obi-Wan

**Knowledge**

He knows his sister as the ever-shifting presence beside him, and later as the force that kicks him in the head in the race to enter the world.

His senses are overwhelmed. The lights are bright and the air is cold and dry. The first touch he feels is a pair of strong, steady hands holding him. He does not cry. Instead, he blinks slowly and opens his eyes for the first time. He sees reddish-brown hair, green eyes, a sad smile. He thinks, "_Father_."

Twenty-two years later, he learns that all the things he thought he knew were false.


	39. ObiWan Vs The Force

A/N: _This one is also for proker (please enlighten us, dear reviewer; do you want your username capitalized if it's in the middle of a sentence? You're confusing the writers here, lol). We had fun finding the reference for this drabble, because unbeknownst to us the "This weapon is your life" scene only happens in the novelization of TPM. Anyway, we prevailed. _

**Words: 98**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Sardonic Humor**

**Characters: Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan**

Obi-Wan vs. The Force

"This weapon is your life." Qui-Gon held out Obi-Wan's dripping lightsaber hilt, plucked from the Nabooian swamp.

"With all respect, Master," Obi-Wan replied, "I thought the Force was a Jedi's life."

"It's important, but sometimes your advantage may lie with your swordsmanship, not your Force mastery."

"A lightsaber is more clumsy and random than the Force."

Qui-Gon glared. "What if you find yourself unable to use the Force? You'll be glad to rely on a weapon made of something so hot that they needed to invent a fourth state of matter to explain it."

Obi-Wan took the lightsaber.


	40. Discovery

Word Count: 94

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: An unnamed Jedi toddler (however, I like to think that a very young Qui-Gon might have been this spastic)

**Discovery**

He has known the Force from the moment he took his first breath. Although he is too young to know it as what gives a Jedi his power, he is able to sense it as the bond between himself and those around him, as the voice which occasionally whispers to him in the silence, and as the light he feels reaching from the world around him into his very being.

And yet, despite this knowledge, it is still more of a discovery for him the day he first looks down and finds his toes.


	41. First Kill

_A/N: P/proker asked for a drabble about an EU Jedi named Drass Jennir and his ethical issues. Unfortunately we know absolutely nothing about him, but out of that challenge I pulled a drabble about someone else's thoughts on death and first kills. I hope you can enjoy this in Jennir's stead. _

**Word Count: 94**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Drama/Tragedy**

**Characters: Luke Skywalker**

First Kill

Luke sat up from his bunk on the Yavin base, stifling gasps, and realized what had been giving him nightmares.

It was Han's callous entrapment of the stromtroopers whose armor he had worn, and Luke's own first kill, a nameless prison guard. Death opened up a poisoned pit of guilt inside Luke, ugly like war stories.

And yet it was all so adventurous, so righteous and heady.

How did Han carry such a history of contradictions?

After Luke came down off of the high of the victory over Yavin, he felt that he understood.


	42. Didn't Even Ask Me Any Questions

**Word Count: 100 exactly**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Drama/Tragedy**

**Characters: Darth Vader, Han Solo**

Didn't Even Ask Me Any Questions

Darth Vader injected Han Solo with enough chemicals so that the smuggler wouldn't remember this in half an hour, then started asking about Skywalker.

"You have a Force-sensitive companion. Tell me about _him._"

Solo's voice cracked as he tried to curse Vader; sparks jumped from his chest to the machine. "Ah--whines sometimes."

"His guardians, how did he mourn them?"

"He didn't—I didn't see—didn't have time until…he always seemed eager to get away from home. He mourned the old Jedi. Not the aunt and uncle."

"Good," Vader breathed._ He thinks of himself first. Turning him will be easy._


	43. Sympathy for the Dark Side

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Drama/Tragedy/ oh no, not another one about Darth Maul**

**Characters: Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Anakin Skywalker**

Sympathy for the Dark Side

Darth Sidious had a flash of precognition when he watched Darth Maul duel the Jedi on Tatooine. When Sidious espied the boy wearing sand-colored clothes as he ran onto the starship's ramp at the edge of the recon droid's field of vision, he knew that nothing except that boy mattered any more. That youngling would one day rule the galaxy with an iron fist. Sidious laughed as he remembered another precognition.

_As the child ran about on the grass Sidious knew that it, his apprentice, would die before its twenty-fifth birthday._

But any remorse he had mattered even less now.


	44. You Are Me

_Phantom-jedi1, whose name was automatically capitalized by my computer, asked for a Luke-and-Vader scene. You get a Luke-and-Vader drabble with multiple scenes. _

**Word Count: 96**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Family/Adventure**

**Character(s): Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader **

You Are Me

I realized that I was you as I stood in front of the Hutt, knowing the refusal to come, feeling the Force with lethal hands.

I realized that you were me when we fought on Dagobah, when the phantasmal smoke rose into the humid air.

I realized that I was you when I bathed in the glow of a synthetic lightsaber crystal, lime green streaming from the oven's seams. We both support the weight of power.

I know that you are me when you finally catch the light that I reflect. It strikes the emperor down.


	45. The Price of Liberty

Word Count: 99

Rating: K

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Mara Jade's parents, Darth Sidious

**The Price of Liberty**

Somehow, they were named as Jedi sympathizers. Perhaps it was because their infant daughter exhibited some of the qualities characteristic of the now-dead Order; she occasionally floated in her sleep, and her blood test had reveled an unusually high level of... what had the doctor called them? Midi-chlorians?

They were told that the Emperor himself would be conducting their investigation. They could not understand why he would take a personal interest in them.

Without preamble, he gave them the option to buy back their freedom.

In the years to come, they would regret giving him Mara.


	46. Distortion I

**Words: 99**

**Rating: K **

**Genre: Dark and Creepy Alternate Universe**

**Characters: Qui-Gon Jinn, Darth Sidious (Warning: main character death)**

Distortion I

The Sith apprentice lay dead at his feet. (Metaphorically—but literally dead. The room was empty, save for Qui-Gon and Sidious.) Obi-Wan, too, lay dead at his feet. But that didn't really matter now, because Sidious had whispered into his thoughts.

_You can cheat death. You can bring back Tahl, if you wish, and cure her blindness. You can free the slave woman. Do whatever you want with the power of the dark side._

So, as the tattooing needle bit into the skin of his cheek, he thought, _The bodies shouldn't haunt me_. _They were just pathetic life forms._


	47. Protector

_Author's Note: Requested by almostinsane. This one is set during Knights of the Old Republic I, and as with other EU situations and their accompanying material, if you haven't played the game, you won't understand the drabble. Accept my apologies._

**Words: 100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Drama/Friendship**

**Characters: Mission Vao, "Sam" (which is a nice, not-gender-specific name for the KOTOR player character, lol)**

**Protector**

Mission always said that she could take care of herself, but knew that she'd never really had a chance to test that assumption. Griff had at least always _been there_. When he left, she met Zaalbar. Although he looked like her anger personified, he was friendly (and it felt good that _he _had been the one needing rescuing.) But when he was captured again, Mission found that all she could do was run.

Sam fought with and for both of them. When Sam was revealed to be Revan, to her own surprise Mission didn't mind. Revan guaranteed even more protection.


	48. Distortion II

_Author's Note: It took me lots of thought to cut this one down into 100 words. I did manage, but a short-story-length version which fleshes out what's hinted at here is going to be posted in the near future under the name _skywalker05_. This is Distortion II, but it's not at all connected to Distortion I in terms of in-universe timeline. Both are simply products of my trying to make the Star Wars universe as strange as possible. _

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: AU, Adventure**

**Character(s): Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda**

Distortion II

Obi-Wan said, "I'll take him to Tatooine."

"No!" Yoda admonished. "Give him his father's name on his father's world, would you? Connections I have among smugglers…"

* * *

Five-year old Han Solo loved the orphanage. By the time he was adopted by a middle-aged couple from Tatooine, he trusted people again. People near his new home paid him to service their vaporators.

* * *

He was twenty-nine and farming his own water when Kenobi asked him for a ride to Mos Eisley. The wizard was going offplanet. Imperials got interested. Han sheltered on Kenobi's contact's, Luke Skywalker's, starship as it blasted off.


	49. Brothers?

Word Count: 13

Rating: K

Genre: Drama-ish

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan and Anakin

_Note:__ This is not actually a drabble. It is merely the end product of a conversation held between skywalker05 and Argenteus Draco on the way to class one day. Enjoy._

**Brothers?**

"You were my brother, Anakin!"

"Not unless Qui-Gon was your father, too!"


	50. What Need Means

**Word Count: 100**

**Genre: Drama**

**Rating: K**

**Characters: Kit Fisto, Aayla Secura**

What Need Means

Kit Fisto notices physical things. It is his style of learning: meditation or lecture does less good than a fight, or a realtime scene to observe. Like other Jedi, he developed specialized skills. His always seemed a bit divorced from the established mentality, because they demanded resistance, reality, action.

Aayla Secura is a beacon of physicality in the austere halls, providing the flow of healthy azure skin. She is something his mind can fixate on, focus on, and use to resist the vague, clouding ideals. He needs her, as the light side needs the dark to have something to resist.


	51. Bonus Drabble!

Word Count: 56

Rating: K+

Genre: Tragedy(?)/Humor/AU

Characters/Pairings: Anakin and Fellow Padawans

**A-Splode!**

It was a little known fact that Anakin Skywalker still had a slave transmitter somewhere in his body. But somehow, someone who wanted him dead found out.

The Padawans were in class when it happened. One minute, he was sitting there. The next... _Poof!_ Smoldering pile of Chosen One.

They all blamed it on the math.


	52. Leia Being Defiant

**Word Count: 87**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Humor**

**Characters: Princess Leia, Wilhuff Tarkin**

Leia Being Defiant

Grand Moff Tarkin took a moment to pinch her cheek like a malevolent uncle as two stormtroopers carried a battered, bleary Leia out of the cell that the torture droid had so recently vacated. As if her face didn't hurt enough already. His cold, stern expression mocked her predicament as well as her title.

"How do you like the hospitality of the Empire, princess?"

She gave him the first response she could think of, even as she felt black unconsciousness overtaking her thoughts. "You have scary cheekbones."


	53. Serenno Niceties

**Word Count: 23**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Action/Humor**

**Characters/Pairings: Anakin Skywalker and Count Dooku**

Serenno Niceties

Dooku's lips curled into a sneer as he sliced through Kenobi's Padawan's arm. Pity. Now the boy would never learn to salute properly.


	54. Distortion III

**Word Count: 118**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Almost a drabble/AU **

**Characters/Pairings: Darth Maul **

Distortion III: Phantom Sage

Morlok is a peaceful world. It is small, comparable to the fourth moon of Yavin, and alone. Covered with jungle, it boasts a varied ecosystem of miniature life forms.

A man sits in a cabin on this planet. Nestled in his voluminous cloak, he touches a faded, patterned hand to his chin. Light ekes in through the cracks in the hovel's ceiling, enough to see that stubble has come in black.

Sidious never expected him to survive Naboo. He had never expected himself to survive the crash the autopilot forced him into afterwards. If the impact did not take him, his own lightsaber would—

But in some buried, intrinsic part of his mind, the Force had whispered _peace_.


	55. Rethinking

**Word Count: 49**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Introspection/Humor**

**Characters/Pairings: Elan Sleazebaggano (man to whom Obi-Wan said "You want to go home and rethink your life") **

Rethinking

_What was so great about this, anyway? This stick between my fingers, this bright powder on the countertop. I feel like I've forgotten a piece of myself._

_But I'm utterly convinced that I'm more than okay now._

_Odd._

_Maybe I should go back to trying to be a doctor. _


	56. A Song

**Note:** Missing scene from chapter four of _Something Like Rebirth_. Yes, this is in fact a shameless plug.

* * *

Word Count: 67

Rating: K+

Genre: Tragedy / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: A musically inclined OC, speaking of Obi-Wan

**A Song**

I promised to write you a song. I could hear it clearly every time I saw you, a bright, clear melody that spoke of bravery, and the darker, underlying counterpoint of your hidden strength. It would sing of your compassion, your valor, all the great deeds you accomplished during your life--

I promised to write you a song.

I never expected to play it at your funeral.


	57. Rebel Without a Cause

**Note:** Character borrowed from skywalker05's fic _Rebellion_. Since this plug actually comes from Argenteus Draco, I don't actually know how shameless it is. And by the way, I apologize in advance for the terrible pun that is the title.

* * *

Word Count: 98

Rating: K

Genre: Introspection

Characters/Pairings: A martially inclined OC

**Rebel Without a Cause**

Cy-Raxx Neirharmn generally liked the other pilots at Echo base. For the first time, she felt she truly had something in common with her friends, this need to fly and to fight.

She talked with them during off-time, slowly realizing that each had their own personal reasons for joining the Rebellion. Some had lost friends and family to the Empire, or their homeworld had been invaded or destroyed. Some were just idealists aiming to restore freedom and democracy to the galaxy.  
Cy had no personal vendetta. She didn't feel she needed one to have an adventure.


	58. Pairings That Never Happened 1

_I'm up for taking suggestions about future "pairings that never happened") as well as for drabbles of any type._

**Word Count: 94**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: AU/Romance**

**Characters/Pairings: BobaMara **

Pairings that Never Happened I

The first time they met, he was without his helmet. She didn't understand the significance. They passed one another in a hallway, and her hands were red with lightsaber burns.

"Looks like you need a medpac," he said.

She held up her hands. "You've got one?"

The second time, he couldn't keep his eyes off her crimson hair.

The third time, she told him that she was Force-sensitive and that he wasn't supposed to know. Her precognition plus the thread of silencing meant that opportunity outweighed risk. He took a chance and kissed her.


	59. Hands

**Word Count: 98**

**Rating: T**

**Genre: Action/Humor**

**Characters/Pairings: OCs, including a snarky Emperor's Hand **

Hands

Shas tried to kill the emperor when she learned it. He took the risk of telling me the secret too so, that I'd dispose of her.

She failed the ultimate test of loyalty twice, and I passed. I felt her acid-sharp anger as I approached her, still dizzy from Palpatine's casual admittance that I wasn't special.

It's part of humanity to want to be unique. When we lose that, we react in different ways. Shas reacted with anger.

I reacted with humor. The last words she heard were "I guess we can't all be good little Emperor's Appendages."

* * *

_Note: We can't take credit for the phrase "Emperor's Appendages"; it's Darthipedia's. This drabble was inspired by a conversation which involved the _Eye of Palpatine _and the Eye of Sauron._


	60. Freedom

Word Count: 63

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Luke

**Freedom**

The first time Luke piloted a speeder on his own -- well, the first time he _legally_ piloted a speeder on his own -- there was an overwhelming sense of freedom. Finally, he could go wherever he wanted without having to ask Uncle Owen first.

He'd barely gone two kilometers before the realization sunk in that there was still nowhere on this planet to go.


	61. Fire

Word Count: 88

Rating: K

Genre: Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Um... Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon? Maybe?

**Fire**

Fire is not something that Jedi come across very often. It is a primitive tool, which other technologies have long since surpassed. Yet there is still something intrinsically comforting about a small fire, when you and your Master can sit beside it and bask in the warmth. The flames cackle and pop, drowning out the words of the lesson he is trying to impart. You don't care though; to you, the lesson is in the fire itself.

Even a small light can be a beacon in the darkness.


	62. Breakup

**Word Count: 91**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Drama**

**Characters/Pairings: teenage!PalpatineOC**

Breakup

Latza interrupted his increasingly heated ruminations. She stood up from the couch and looked back at him, flame-light catching her golden hair.

With vestiges of shyness he dropped his gaze from her features to the sheaf of papers on his lap. They were maps of star systems, and lists of politician's holdings and traits, everything that the newest representative of Naboo needed to understand and use the Senate.

"The world," she spat, "isn't just about you!"

_Yes_, thought Palpatine, more confused as to how she couldn't understand than arrogant, _it is._


	63. Your Father's Fate

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Drama/Tragedy**

**Characters: Luke, Yoda**

Your Father's Fate

"…or suffer your father's fate will you."

Yoda knows that Vader is not suffering. It isn't usually the darksiders who do, mentally. It is Luke who suffers, with the uncertainty, guilt, and desire for justice with which the truly good are plagued. Yoda's long life has taught him that although one may try to drive the galaxy toward justice, success never lasts for long.

But he must keep things simple for Luke, who is young and full of hope. Maybe an uncomplicated, violent optimism will save the galaxy in the wake of the Jedi Order's penchants for lies and diplomacy.


	64. Pairings that Never Happened II

**Note:** If you look back a few chapters, you'll find another reference to this pairing. Because, in my mind, it did happen. Second drabble to follow.

* * *

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: Drama / Family

Characters/Pairings: Qui-Gon/Shmi

**Pairings That Never Happened II**

He and Obi-Wan are sent to serve as negotiators, and she is the first person he sees when their ship docks. She greets them with a kind smile, explaining that her master will see them shortly, and leads them inside the house.

He likes her immediately, and cannot resist sending Obi-Wan away that evening so that he might speak with her privately. It doesn't turn out how he intends; they do very little talking.

Almost ten years later, he sees her again on Tatooine. He can't say why he is so drawn to her child, and she keeps her secret.


	65. Excuses

Word Count: 95

Rating: K

Genre: Humor

Characters/Pairings: Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin

**Excuses**

At first, Obi-Wan thinks that his machine must not be calibrated correctly, because there are two things very strange about the boy's blood. The first is a midi-chlorians count of almost 20,000. The second is a strikingly similar DNA pattern to that of his Master.

* * *

There is a brief moment when Obi-Wan thinks he sees embarrassment flash in Qui-Gon's eyes, but it's gone before he can be sure. He explains, in a tone that makes Obi-Wan only slightly suspicious, that the boy has no father; the Force created Anakin.

The Council does not look convinced.


	66. What It Takes

Word Count: 98

Rating: K

Genre: Drama / Tragedy

Characters/Pairings: ARC Trooper Alpha-98 (from The Cestus Deception)

**What It Takes**

He knows intimately what it takes to kill a clone, and it's obvious from the recording that these JK droids are more than capable.

But this Jedi, the Nautolan... Nate respects him instantly. He has skills well beyond those of a trooper. It's a close fight, but Kit defeats the droid.

At the completion of their training, each clone had memorized a series of commands preparing for emergency situations. Order 66 suddenly floats to the forefront of his mind, as he wonders exactly what it takes to kill a Jedi.

He hopes he never has to do so.


	67. Pairings That Never Happened III

**Word Count: 92**

**Rating: T**

**Genre: Romance**

**Characters/Pairings: one sided-ish HanMara **

Carbonite Stare

Jabba's Palace reeked in the Force. Olfactory senses did not take lightly to it either, but it was the psychic redolence, the pervading sin, which brought Mara, protesting quietly, to the carbonite.

Solo was attractive, she had to admit, so much more so than anyone else who looked at her as she danced in her guise. Waiting for Skywalker was boring, and Solo was staring.

Perhaps he would inform her of the Jedi's plan in more detail than she had, if she freed him.

Perhaps he would mistake her for the princess.


	68. The Defenestration of Mace Windu

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: T**

**Genre: Action/Tragedy**

**Characters/Pairings: Mace Windu, Chancellor Palpatine**

The Defenestration of Mace Windu

Palpatine's face looks ugly like war, all lined, detailed, and taut.

Lightning feels like the universe is stricken with shatterpoints. Already it has been hit once—_but we never saw when_-- and now, like the glass, its shards are beginning to distinguish themselves from the whole.

The whole world vibrates, shakesclencheshurts with the lightning--

Anakin tips the scales, like Mace always knew he would. Everyone knew he would be the focal point; just not that it would be this terrible, this close and brutal. The Chosen One rebelling against the speakers of the prophecy was surely impossible!

Then falling shatteringshatteringshattering…


	69. Water

Word Count: 120

Rating: K

Genre: Humor / No,-this-one's-not-quite-a-drabble-either

Characters/Pairings: Anakin and Obi-Wan

**Water**

The first time he sees Obi-Wan pour an unfinished glass of water down the galley sink, he is astounded. He is even more surprised when its explained that there is a containment vessel beneath their feet which provides water to the entire ship.

He gets used to the idea of water being plentiful during his stay on Coruscant, though it still boggles his mind, especially the first time he walks through the Room of a Thousand Fountains.

Nothing, however, could have prepared him for the sight of the oceans on Naboo. Before Obi-Wan can stop him, he runs into the surf. Then he makes the mistake of trying to drink.

He never looks at water quite the same way again.


	70. Dichotomy Inscribed

_This one was inspired by a couple of conversations about how Palpatine must have a "politician's vocabulary"—and we're not talking about our current president here, because we meant that he would be very good with words. So, here's something from his POV, in RotS. (I had so much fun writing this. Glossary by request.) _

**Word Count: 57**

**Genre: Action**

**Rating: K+**

**Characters: Palpatine, Mace Windu**

Dichotomy Inscribed

Monochrome effervescence scintillates as divergent hues collide. Flare—lightsabers part. Electrum shears into sparks and gravity takes its useless halves from my hands. Noctilucent inhibitions crumple their restraints, transform--electricity manifests in jagged bolts like gnarled digits, overflowing from me, siphoning anguish.

Skywalker's uncertainty balances. An azure slash loosens amethyst.

The Order's pinnacle, rent asunder, crumbles, epigeous.


	71. Beauty

**Word Count:98**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Drama/Action**

**Characters: a slave girl, who, I imagine, Oola replaced.**

**Beauty**

My life is dictated by beauty and ugliness. The Hutt is ugly. I, they say, am beautiful. Nevertheless, he disposes of me, as if setting a flower in an incinerator, and lets a Gammorean guard slip in to provide even more fun.

The rancor eats the Gammorean in two crunching bites, drool coating both their hides.

It comes after me next, monstrous, feet stamping, breath reeking. I'm frozen. Last thoughts now, muster something you'll never have the chance to revisit–

Both that which is ugly and that which is beautiful are devoured. The beast does not judge.

Beautiful.


	72. Superhuman

**Word Count:100**

**Rating: K**

**Genre:Drama/Fantasy**

**Characters: Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon**

**Superhuman**

"He said, 'No one can kill a Jedi.'"

Obi-Wan knows that Qui-Gon is thinking of Tahl. He stammers, "It amazes me sometimes that people think we're superhuman. We're not."

"...But we are. You might not think so, seeing Padawans' cliques, rivalries, attachments. But if you see mindreading prompt peace, or criminals raise their hands after attacking police, when just one of us comes near...We mustn't lower ourselves with humility. We're entitled to help lesser beings."

Obi-Wan isn't sure how to answer. "Ah, is that all, Master? You haven't found a hyperdrive?"

"No. I just wanted to talk."

Obi-Wan smiles.


	73. Flash

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: Drama

Characters/Pairings: Darth Vader, Sors Bandeam (the youngling who mistakes Anakin/Vader as a rescuer during Operation: Knightfall)

**Flash**

"Master Skywalker, there are too many of them. What are we going to do?"

_Flash._

A blue lightsaber ignites in his hand. Whenever he thinks of the Council Chamber, he will remember it being bathed in this eerie glow.

_Flash_.

The fires of Mustafar flare below him, and as they do, Anakin Skywalker disappears into the flames.

_Flash_.

Even in the armored suit, he feels the oppressive weight of memories.

_Flash_.

Around a corner, he sees the face of a child who once called him Master Skywalker.

_Flash_.

He looks up, focuses on the spot, but the child is gone.


	74. Good Earth

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Reflection

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi

**Good Earth**

To be a Jedi is an honor. But not all initiates go on to become Jedi Knights.

There are those who fail some early training, but never completely abandon it. More than peacekeepers, they are proponents of civilization.

When people come together to better irrigate the land and properly spread their crops, they become stronger. Farms grow into towns, towns grow into cities, cities grow cultures and governments, and eventually join the Republic.

To be a Jedi is an honor. To be a Jedi who works with good earth and sows the seeds of civilization is nothing short of that.


	75. Unblemished

**Word Count: 77**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Drama**

**Characters/Pairings: Emperor Palpatine**

**Unblemished**

_You, hero, will appear to have aged quickly,_ thought the emperor, steepling his fingers, looking at a still holo of Luke which had been taken on Bespin. _I see the limp flesh on your face that is the scars of Hoth. No Jedi's skin is unblemished, not after thorough training. My lightning will touch you too, whether you are in my service or resisting it. You will become an old man early, like your masters and I. _

_And broken, aged, worn, you will find the dark side to be your one remaining strength._


	76. Public Speaking

**Word Count: 82**

**Rating: G**

**Genre: Humor**

**Character(s): Young!Dooku, Lorian Nod**

**Public Speaking**

Even Jedi need to learn public speaking. Padawan Dooku chose the great oration of a chancellor past to read in front of the class.

"…liberty, and justice." Dooku boomed. "To spread throughout the stars the light or a new era, both liberating and connecting all species, unsundering what biology had wrought apart…"

Padawan Lorian, sitting in the audience leaned over to whisper to an acquaintance, "He's wizard. But somehow, even talking about justice and equality, he makes it sound kind of _creepy_."


	77. Guilt

**Word Count: 96**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Drama/Tragedy**

**Characters/Pairings: Luke Skywalker**

**Guilt**

Luke happened to overhear the specs in the canteen.

"123 hyperdrive field generators, thousand of berths, thousands of cantinas…" A group of Rebels toasted their success.

He caught the boasting man's shoulder. "Cantinas?"

"Aye. They built a whole world, and it still couldn't stand up to us!" The gaggle cheered.

Silence enveloped Luke like a thick blanket, because suddenly he could see faces in his mind. Smiling bartenders, Wookiee janitors, boys who liked to call themselves stormtroopers.

And he had killed them all, in an instant, on the Death Star.

They would populate his nightmares tonight.


	78. Dejarik

**Word Count: 100**

**Rating: G**

**Genre: Action**

**Character(s): Obi-Wan, Anakin**

**Special thanks to: Andrew**

**Dejarik**

Useless flourishes interrupt conflict at Mustafar. Each Jedi swings their lightsaber around themselves in a web of light, neither attacking, nor defending. Extraneous.

It is their brains catching up to the Force.

Five moves ahead of their reflexes, it plays dejarik in their minds. Extrapolating, seeing_ he will move here I will move here_, choosing perfect responses, placing preemptive strikes. Twenty minutes of a potential battle goes on in twenty seconds. When they finally strike again, it may look blatant or poorly chosen. It may look needlessly flashy.

But that is because one cannot see the battlefield behind their eyes.


	79. Saving a Life

Word Count: 88

Rating: K+

Genre: Action / Drama

Characters/Pairings: Darra Thel-Tanis

**Saving a Life**

Darra knew that by putting herself between Ferus and Granta Omega, she was saving her fellow Padawan's life by giving hers. What she didn't know was that Ferus would be lost and guilt ridden following her death, and would leave the Jedi Order upon completion of the mission.

She wasn't saving him from blaster fire; she was saving him from the purge that would happen at the Temple almost five years later.

But Darra didn't know that. She only knew that the Force told her this was right.


	80. Invisible

Word Count: 108

Rating: K+

Genre: AU / Drama

Characters/Pairings: Shmi Skywalker

**Invisible**

They told her it was in memory of Qui-Gon that they bought her freedom. For Master Jinn; not for Anakin.

She wasn't allowed to see him. They told her she could live and work in the Temple so long as she didn't interfere with his training. She could watch him grow, so long as she did it from the shadows.

But she was sure he could sense her, even if he didn't know where she was. He could feel her pain.

And so she could only watch as Anakin -- her grown-up son -- strode purposefully out of the Temple to rescue the mother he'd left in slavery on Tatooine.


	81. Reunion

Word Count: 72

Rating: K

Genre: More general snarky-ness

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan and Anakin (as blue ghosts)

**Reunion**

"You got _old_."

"Nice to see you too, Anakin."

The dead Chosen One ran a young, unscarred hand through his still-brown (blueish?) hair. "I didn't get old," he said nonchalantly. "I wonder why you did."

"I want you to know that I blame you entirely for all my grey hairs. I think it's in the Skywalker genes."

Anakin considered this for a moment, then grinned impishly.

"So it's Luke's fault too."


	82. Gifts

Word Count: 99

Rating: K

Genre: Family

Characters/Pairings: Leia Organa, Bail Organa

**Gifts**

_"Leia, do you remember your mother? Your real mother?"_

_"Just a little bit... She was... very beautiful. Kind, but sad..."_

_--Luke and Leia, Return of the Jedi_

* * *

Leia was taking her hair down from it's ornate wrappings when her father entered the room. She caught his reflection in the mirror, and smiled.

"I wanted to give you a proper birthday gift," he said, coming up behind her and putting a hand on her shoulders. With the other, he produced a datapad which displayed the figure of a young woman speaking before the Senate. Leia watched the recording, entranced. The speech was stirring, full of reigned in passion that Leia envied. "Who is she?"

"Her name was Padmé." Then, after a moment's hesitation, Bail added, "Your mother."


	83. Similar and Different

Genre-- Introspection

Word Count--100

Rating-- K

Characters--Obi-Wan, Anakin, Ahsoka Tano

_Author's note--I wouldn't say this "contains spoilers for" The Clone Wars, but it would certainly help if you've seen it. _

Similar and Different

Obi-Wan remembered Anakin's discomfort at the Battle of Christophsis, when Anakin had realized that the long-awaited reinforcements were just one small Jedi, that the long-awaited Padawan was for him...that Ahsoka was as reckless as Anakin himself. Maybe, Anakin's obvious disapproval of Ahsoka's eagerness to leap into things–and Obi-Wan had been pleasantly surprised that his former Padawan hadn't simply leaped in too–would allow Anakin to see his own shortcomings. The student teaches the teacher, it was said.

But war, Obi-Wan knew, was no place to raise a Padawan.

As long as Ahsoka survived to temper Anakin, Anakin would be all right.


	84. Attachment

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan (Ben) Kenobi

**Attachments**

In the back of his mind, he'd always supposed that he would train Luke the way he'd trained Anakin, the way that he had been trained by Qui-Gon, the way that generations of Jedi Knights had trained their apprentices. But from the moment that Luke ran from the Jawa sandcrawler, he knew that it was already too late for that. Luke had attachments to his home and his family that no Jedi training could ever overcome.

If Luke was to begin the Jedi Order anew, Obi-Wan knew that it would never be the same as the Order he had known.


	85. Orders

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: AU / Drama

Characters/Pairings: Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, Clone Captain Rex

**Orders**

The command came to every clone in the galaxy simultaneously. _"Execute Order 66."_

In a plain, utilitarian workroom over Coruscant, Rex waited with his best men and thought of the task now before them. The 501st had been called upon to infiltrate the Temple itself. They moved in silence, gathering equipment and preparing themselves mentally for the mission.

The door opened, and General Skywalker walked straight to Rex, putting a hand on the armored shoulder. "We have a new assignment..." But his sentence trailed off when he found a blaster pistol pressed against his chest.

"Orders, sir," Rex said simply.


	86. Surprise

**Word Count: 85**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Romance**

**Characters/Pairings: HanLeia**

**Surprise**

Kissing Leia was nothing like kissing the type of girl Han had thought he preferred-- the curvy ones who hung out at cantinas and were there to be looked at, to look, to surprise with a kiss and be rewarded with an evening of companionship that one or both of them would leave just as quickly as it had begun.

No, Leia, even though she had not been expecting him to enter the small room on the_ Falcon,_ was definitely the one who surprised him.


	87. Calm Center

**Word Count: 96**

**Genre: Introspection/Humor/Ironic**

**Rating: K**

**Characters/Pairings: Ciaràn Surin of—brace yourself for shameless advertisement--_Voice of the Shadows. _**

**Calm Center**

Zabraks are not naturally aggressive. No species which has fledged over and over again from their homeworld and colonies kinder than it are still so tied to their roots as to be homogenous.

Ciaràn Surin was proud of his species, whether it was that or his more immediate heritage that was responsible for his quick reflexes, strong muscles, and confidence in combat. He knew that, in order to learn to slow his heartbeats like his Master wanted him to, he would just have to visualize something that made him happy and comfortable.

Such as a melee.


	88. Erasure

**Word Count: 95**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Tragedy/Introspection**

**Characters: Darth Vader, Cin Drallig**

**Erasure**

_Extinguish the Jedi. Make history forget them._

Darth Sidious' thoughts roiled through Darth Vader's mind, as the former Jedi stood over the body of Battlemaster Cin Drallig.

The Jedi always taught that sentients were more than matter, more than bodies. That they could not really be killed, because the Force would remember them.

Darth Vader wanted to kill the Jedi's memories, their souls, their legend, too.

He brought his foot down on Drallig's lightsaber hilt, discarded next to the body, and pushed down, trying to crack the shell, to crush the components into the ground.


	89. They Call This Learning I

_They Call This Learning I _

_Author's Note: This series was inspired by classic arts we were learning about in college. Needless to say, even in class our minds are stuck in a galaxy far, far away. So here are three drabbles about Anakin._

_This drabble was inspired by the Old English poem "The Seafarer". The title comes from a line in that poem which means 'Wyrd (Fate) is fully inexorable." _

**Word Count: 108**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Tragedy**

**Characters: Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker**

**Wyrd Bið Ful Aread**

From sand to sand, he has come a long way. It burns across his body no more than it ever did on Tatooine.

He knows that it should hurt more. That lava-rivulets are not bantha-roads, are not tempered by existing on the surface of a planet. But either his nerves have run over with pain and can give him no more, or he simply realizes that he is supposed to be here, that this is as inexorable as gravity, that Obi-Wan above, that teacher-killer-brother, is meant to be there.

But then the agony sends Anakin back to himself, and he screams and faints because the pain is suddenly--


	90. They Call This Learning II

_They Call This Learning II_ comes from the following historical side-note: Beethoven's third symphony was originally titled _Bonapart_. However, when Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French, Beethoven became disgusted and the dedication was changed to "celebrate the memory of a great man."

Also, there is no typo in the title. _Eroica_ is the Italian word for heroic.

* * *

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Bail Organa (and the Alderaan Philharmonic)

**Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major**

**Eroica**

The piece was commissioned for the first Empire Day, for a private performance following a larger concert. It was all secret, of course. His close friends were all known dissidents of the Empire, and the composer was a man who had already been banned by the Imperial Board of Culture.

The orchestra didn't even know the significance of the piece they performed, nor could they see that their audience consisted of very select senators. They merely accepted the new conductor and adjusted to his style, so they could play the piece with all the reverence deserved by a fallen hero.


	91. They Call This Learning III

_They Call This Learning III is inspired by the following lines from _Hamlet _by William Shakespeare, which are supposed to be about the glum prince but are obviously actually about Darth Vader:_

_"Seems", madam? Nay, it is not "seems".  
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,  
Nor customary suits of solemn black,  
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,  
No, nor the fruitfull river of the eye,  
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,  
Together with all forms, moods, shades of grief  
That can denote me truly. These indeed "seem",  
For they are actions that a man might play;  
But I have that within that passes show  
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."_

**Word Count: 97**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Introspection**

**Character(s): Darth Vader**

**Suspiration**

_Once_, Darth Vader thought, _they were so proud._

He had known few Wookiees personally, but had heard of their beautiful planet, and their valiant, brief war against the Seperatists. But the cruel, conniving emperor had sent him to oversee the taking of Wookiee slaves.

He could not stop the process; he wasn't ready to challenge Sidious, and the Empire needed manpower.

A dull-eyed Wookiee child on a chain looked up at him, then flinched away, its matted fur flopping over its eyes, when an electronic, unstoppable breath escaped him.

_Once, _Darth Vader thought, _I was so proud._


	92. Chance

**Word Count: 52**

**Genre: Introspection/Angst**

**Rating: K**

**Character(s): Luke Skywalker, post-ESB**

**Chance**

3,720 to one, and you'll successfully navigate an asteroid field.

3,720 billion citizens to one, and the Dark Lord is his father.

He wishes to harrow the fields of chance and turn up that single diamond of _I do not have to face him_, and yet redemption would be more valuable still.


	93. Legacy of the Force

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Tragedy

Characters/Pairings: Jacen Solo and Anakin Skywalker

**Legacy of the Force**

It was a tenant of the Jedi Code that _"There is no death; there is the Force."_ He'd known this mantra since childhood, but it had lost it's meaning as he'd grown. Of course there was death; there would be death as long as there was war, and there wasn't time for honor and ceremonies and becoming one with the Force.

He expected to know nothing. Imagine his surprise when there was figure there to greet him, a man he recognized from old holos and his mother's stories.

"I know," said Anakin Skywalker. "It's an awful legacy to leave behind."


	94. Another Hardened Layer On His Heart

**Word Count: 98**

**Genre: Action/Tragedy**

**Rating: K+**

**Character(s): Darth Vader, Ahsoka Tano**

_Note: __**Mathematica **__(go read her fics, they're amazing) requested "__Anakin killed Ahsoka during the Purge, right? So, surely there could be a fic about that ...?"_

* * *

**Another Hardened Layer On His Heart**

The dramatic confrontation is over; he has distanced Anakin Skywalker from himself enough to stab Ahsoka Tano through the sternum. But still, afterward, when he is returning to the entrance, flushed with ruination from his personal, essential, _fated_ scouring of the Temple, he sees her body and thinks _how can the Force do this to me. _

_It was over. I made my choice, and I killed her._

_And now, as I'm standing here and _killing her again_ in my thoughts, I'm repenting, and the fact that it doesn't matter that I repent means that I never will again._


	95. Kinesthesia

**Word Count: 97**

**Genre: General/Oh no, not another one about…you know.**

**Rating: K or so **

**Character(s): Darth Maul**

* * *

**Kinesthesia**

Crucified and formed by pain as he was, his hands were transformed last. Dimly he watched the ink, the fluted stripes and squared spirals, creep down his arms. When his hands were finished, he seldom made a movement without seeing the remainders of his loyalty. When the bruises and the pain faded, when his exercise routines began again in earnest, he would catch his own changed skin out of the corner of his eyes and start. But quickly he grew used to the markings, and his loyalty and his perception of self became one and the same.


	96. Improvements

**Word Count: 90**

**Genre: General**

**Rating: K **

**Character(s): Yoda, a handful of battle droids**

_Note: This drabble was inspired by the Clone Wars movie as well as by the first episode of the TV show. _

* * *

**Improvements**

Superior forces are essential in war. The Separatists were always seeking to improve their battle droids, to make them more able to match their foes, the human clones. But as the droids became more intelligent, they became more distractible; as they became more adaptable, they became less perfected. Now, thought Jedi Master Yoda, as he looked down from a ridge on Toydaria's Coral Moon, the droids were capable of _thinking_, of being independent of their squadrons, of joking, of making mistakes.

Now, thought Yoda, they were vastly inferior to clones.


	97. Recovery

**Word Count: 87**

**Genre: Tragedy/Introspection**

**Rating: K**

**Characters: Asajj Ventress**

* * *

**Recovery**

Beings can get over even the most debilitating hurts, even the fear of abandonment, if they live and think for long enough afterward. But not if the offenses keep occurring, over and over. Every time Asajj Ventress fights a new Jedi and he doesn't try to turn her like her master (dead, abandoned Ky Narec )would have, it's another abandonment. Because anger and loss are crutches, but the light side would cure her permanently. Except, it seems, no one wants to spend the words to save her.


	98. Rivalry

Word Count: 94

Rating: K

Genre: General / AU-ish

Characters/Pairings: Mara Jade and a vindictive, revenge seeking, ten-year-old Leia

**Rivalry**

She had always been the center of attention, the prettiest, the smartest in her class. Then _she_ showed up one day, and tried to take her place.

_She_ aced the Galactic Politics exam, while she was the one destined to become a senator. _She_ was picked first on the scamball field, and everyone talked about _her_ vivid red hair and pretty green eyes.

But _her_ parents never came to recitals, and _she_ never had time to play with the other children after school. And she reminded _her_ of those facts every chance she got.


	99. Precious Resource

Word Count: 97

Rating: K

Genre: General

Characters/Pairings: Luke Skywalker

**Precious Resource**

No one thinks twice about their water on Coruscant; they don't care that hundreds of thousands of gallons of it are wasted every day, poured uselessly down drains and gutters and sewage systems (because there are no rivers or lakes on Coruscant for the water to collect in) before it is pumped into a refining facility and made mostly clean again.

It never tastes the same to him, not after growing up on Tatooine, where the water was never less-than-pure, harvested directly from the clouds, and far too precious a resource to not think about.


	100. Times of War

**Authors' Note: **Le gasp, we've reached one hundred drabbles! As somewhat of an anniversary celebration, we're doing two things: 1) We'd like each reader to tell us their _five favorite _drabbles from this collection, as well as guess _who wrote each, _if you would like. Just for lulz. We'll post our five favorites sometime in the future (and _maybe_ tell you who wrote them).

2) The next eight drabbles are going to be a series, encompassing (in the first one) the history of lightsabers and (in the latter seven) the Lightsaber Forms. Enjoy!

* * *

**Word Count: 91**

**Genre: Introspection**

**Rating: K**

**Character(s): an OC living soon after the Great Hyperspace Wars**

**Times of War**

_It's truly a sword now, _thought the Jedi engineer, as the lightsaber, shorn of its power cord, flared in his hand. _We thought we'd distanced ourselves from brutality, from our uncivilized past, but still this is a sword in my hand. We tried to progress, and came right back to where we began. I am carrying weapons with which to kill, only they are of electricity and metal, instead of stone and metal. In a world of blasters and starships, still we cling to swords. Why?_

_These are times of war. _


	101. Form I

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Kit Fisto

**Form I**

He favors Shii-Cho because it's simple, and he does not have any desire to think of himself as being particularly complicated. It is the form at the base of his training, and therefore at the core of his being. Because it's his Jedi training that defines Kit Fisto, that makes him different from every other being in the galaxy, even his fellows in the Temple. He is one of the few who use Shii-Cho without the embellishment of any of the other forms. Just simple-- direct-- attacks--

--Pushing forward--

At the head of the line, leading the men into combat.


	102. Form II

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Count Dooku

**Form II**

He had always preferred lightsaber-to-lightsaber combat, because there was something noble, something elegant and honorable, about being able to face one's opponent and look him in the eye, to be close enough to smell the sweat on his brow and feel the fear in his heart. It was exhilarating, and there was a poetic irony in the contrast between this cavalier feeling and the precision cuts and parries of Makashi.

He knows, as a Jedi, that a duel shouldn't be so intoxicating.

He learns, as a Sith, how to draw on this passion.

And the nobel heritage of Makashi remains.


	103. Form III

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi

**Form III**

As a Padawan, he shifts from one combat form to another. When pressed to pick one on which to focus his studies, he practices Ataru with his master, and for a while thinks that the dynamic tactics appeal to him.

Then they duel the Sith apprentice.

Aggression and the blind pain of loosing Qui-Gon combine to bring him closer to darkness than he has ever come before. He finally touches it the moment he kills the Zabrak. After that, he begins to study Soresu, because the focus that the form requires means that he will never again become his enemy.


	104. Form IV

Word Count: 100

Rating: K

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Yoda

**Form IV**

It isn't entirely true what he teaches, that size matters not. It's simply a matter of making up for size with speed and agility.

Once a year, he demonstrates the adaptability of Ataru by dueling Tyvokka. The younglings watching have never seen either with blade in hand before. A few laugh at the spectacle before them: Master Yoda, who is not-quite-taller than they are, standing in the Wookiee's shadow.

The signal to start is given. Two blades come together in a furious exchange. When the final strike lands, he knows they will never again judge him by his stature.


	105. Form V

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader

**Form V**

Shien was born out of Soresu, developed by Masters who felt that Form III's failings could be resolved by placing emphasis on creating attack openings, instead of waiting for them. When he learned this, it seemed natural that he should practice Shien against Obi-Wan.

It is less natural -- indeed, it goes against nearly every fiber of his being -- when they duel on Mustafar. Perhaps because against a single opponent, he utilizes Djem So; still Form V, but removed enough from it's variant so as to be completely different, just as Vader considers himself to be removed from his past as Anakin Skywalker.


	106. Form VI

Word Count: 99

Rating: K

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Cin Drallig

**Form VI**

From the moment he picks up his first lightsaber, he excels in it's study. The years that it takes him to master the first five classic forms feel like barely a day, with the katas and velocities moving smoothly from Shii-Cho to Shien and back. 

It seems strange to him that, with this background, it would be Niman that is the most difficult to learn. A combination of it's ancestor forms, it takes him nearly a decade to find the balance between offense and defense, aggression and detachment, power and fluidity. 

He refuses full Mastership until he finds it.


	107. Form VII

Word Count: 70

Rating: K

Genre: General / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Mace Windu

**Form VII**

He has never been more powerful than he is at the moment when he faces the Sith Master. The dark side pulses through the room, through _him_, in a mockery of his heartbeat. He uses Vaapad to walk the knife blade between triumph and temptation. The balance between darkness and light gives him the strength to resist. He _will not_ fall.

He has never been more powerful.

Nor more vulnerable. 


	108. Existence in the Pit

**Word Count: 51**

**Genre: Introspection**

**Rating: K**

**Character(s): Emperor Palpatine**

**Existence In The Pit**

_I'm proud of you, Vader. You've followed the tradition of Sith apprentices./ Neither of us expected this, and so I am caught off guard./ How inglorious, that this is such a physical sensation, so brutish and insistent./Screaming doesn't relieve the pain, but my spirit hears, and flees to a new body._


	109. Fused

**Word Count: 98**

**Genre: Portentous Vision**

**Rating: K**

**Character(s): Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi**

**Fused **

Eleven-year-old Anakin Skywalker thinks it is a droid at first, the tall figure striding toward him.

He diagnoses; durasteel limbs, but this is a cyborg, more complete and functional than any he has seen. The man must have been wounded extensively, for even his head to need covering, but the mask also serves an aesthetic purpose, lending the whole figure a canine fluidity of form. Anakin admires the fused types of strength.

_The walls dissolve. _

_Obi-Wan's thoughts break into his reverie. "The natives have their superstitions, but I see nothing that proves this cave can tell the future."_


	110. Reaffirmation

**Word Count: 100**

**Genre: Romance/Tragedy**

**Rating: PG**

**Character(s)/Pairings: AniPadme, Obi-Wan **

**Reaffirmation**

If he asked her on her deathbed to marry him again, what would she say?

_No!—_wincing, remembering his cruel eyes, watching serene, blue-as-ocean-souled Obi-Wan—

_Yes—_hating for one strong moment the Jedi and their vows of apathy, their Council where Anakin looked for wisdom and received chidings—

_Yes_—I love him. Not the Anakin they pushed him to be, but the Anakin who slices a Naboo pear and leaves it for me to find on the table for my breakfast after I wake up and he is gone, Anakin who suggested "we name our child Luke: it means light."


	111. Lies

**Words: 96**

**Genre: Action/Creepy**

**Rating: K+**

**Characters: Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn**

**Lies**

Vivacious and just out of reach, you know death is waiting for your move—!

You always think someone will save you, Jedi. You lean on the Force like old men, like your patriarch; you think Naboo will save you—

I could taste your death hovering in the room if it were not filled all ready with ion-lightning-scent, and your closed, meditating eyes do not see my smirk.

I hope the Force lies to you and gives you false hope, so that you are surprised when you die, and gasp close fear into the Force--!


	112. Truths

Word Count: 78

Rating: K+

Genre: Drama / Introspection

Characters/Pairings: Qui-Gon Jinn

**Truths**

Retract the weapon. Kneel. See--

_The face of the Sith, the thrust of the crimson blade. The face of the boy, blue eyes forever tainted by internal fire. The face of his Padawan, lined and creased with age, but settled into a final expression of acceptance that he intuitively understands._

_This is the future that he will not live to see. War, defeat, rebellion, redemption. In time, there will be balance._

--Now--

Rise. Block, parry, advance, defend…

...Fall...


	113. Pyrolysis

**Word Count: 99**

**Genre: Angst-ish**

**Rating: K**

**Characters: Luke Skywalker**

**Pyrolysis**

Luke reaches into the dying pyre and with one black-gloved hand shedding flimsi-ashes pulls out the black-angled mask. A plane of it slews away as it moves, dislodging more sparks, birthing flames that, greedy, steal in scant breaths of air before flicking out. A chemical smell hits him; wiring somewhere in the helmet.

Luke wants to see the mask for the last time as it is now—one cheek caved in, one eye blackened, curves truncated—so that he can truly illustrate to himself that it, once so solid, is far too intangible to be Anakin Skywalker's true face.


	114. Blood

Word Count: 100

Rating: K+

Genre: AU / Drama

Characters/Pairings: Anakin/Vader and Younglings

**Blood**

Her words echo in his head, and for a moment the face illuminated in the glow of his lightsaber has her dark eyes and the graceful curve of her jawline. If his child had been born a year earlier, he realizes, she would be here, in the Temple, eradicated with the rest.

The children are staring at him, frightened by his indecision. With a shaking hand, he points the blade at the door. "Go. You are not safe here."

_ You are not safe anywhere._

The clones will kill them.

But at least their blood will not be on his hands.


	115. Regret

Word Count: 57

Rating: K

Genre: Drama / Tragedy

Characters/Pairings: Count Dooku

**Regret**

If there was one thing that he always regretted (and Count Dooku regretted very little in his long life), it was that he never made more of an effort to mend whatever resentment lay between himself and Qui-Gon Jinn; that the last time he spoke to his first apprentice was at the funeral of his second.


	116. Slow Thoughts

**Word Count: 100**

**Genre: Angst**

**Rating: K+**

**Characters: General Grievous **

**Slow Thoughts**

Sometimes…I (_thinking is so _slow_—give me speed, give me battles for honor and give me the quick blood of my foes) _think that I chose this metal body…

Sometimes I (_feel trapped here, like a spider in a cage; we trapped spiders as lucky charms once, and I don't want to be a machine-thing kept as a good-luck charm for Count Dooku, and _her _name is on the tip of where my tongue should be; it began with R, _rrrrrr_ like the whine of servomotors) _trap a Jedi beneath my footclaws and know that I did _choose_…and chose right…

* * *

**A/N: **This was inspired by the Clone Wars episode in which Grievous claims that he chose to be transformed into a cyborg. I didn't like that—for some reason, I preferred the original story, where the CIS forced him into the transformation and messed with his brain to make him _think _he enjoyed it. So this drabble tries to capture his conflict.

R is, of course, for Ronderu, his lost love.


	117. Homonyms

**Word Count: 55**

**Genre: Thought provoking/humor**

**Rating: K**

**Characters: Anakin Skywalker**

* * *

Homonyms

It was one of those shocks a child never forgets, when nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker heard Obi-Wan Kenobi refer to Qui-Gon as "master" and thought for one instant that all the glory of the Jedi had been a ruse, that Jinn was a slaver.

(That would certainly explain the covey of young women on the ship.)


	118. Rumors

Word Count:100

Rating: K+

Genre: General / Drama

Characters/Pairings: Jedi Padawans

**Rumors**

Even Jedi told rumors. The Masters had done it when they were children, so apprentices were rarely scolded for it.

But something changed after the Clone Wars began, as a frightened hush fell over the Temple. Where the news had previously been heartening -- _"Just passed his Trials; everyone knew he'd do well," --_ or perhaps a lighthearted jab at a contemporary, now the rushed, whispered stories were, _"Haven't seen her since she left for Jabiim,"_ or _"I heard all four of them were killed."_

No one wanted to spread rumors like that, not in a time when so many were true.


	119. Prescience

**Word Count: 72**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Ironic/Grim**

**Characters: if I told you now, it would ruin the surprise**

Prescience

A man stood on a corner in the city. He wore ragged robes and carried a sign which read in shaky Aurebesh, "The end is nigh!"

A young girl on tugged on her father's cloak as he moved to the other side of the slidewalk. "Daddy, what's that say?"

"Nothing, dear. Don't point."

Again she tugged, silent now, unexplainably unsettled.

"Stop that, Leia. You're old enough now to walk home from here."


	120. Distortion IV

**Word Count: 97**

**Rating: K+**

**Genre: Creepy**

**Characters: Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi**

Distortion IV

There had been no one left to fight in the halls, but Obi-Wan felt as bone-weary, physically and mentally, as if he had slain an army. Yoda's bruised emotions echoed his own. It was with a fear less controlled than he had felt in many years that he watched Yoda activate the holocam.

The assailant stabbed Cin Drallig through the heart, stood over him, and turned to reveal the bearded face of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

He doesn't remember attacking the Battlemaster. The last thing he remembers before returning to the desiccated Temple is seeing Anakin off to Utapau.


	121. Three Heroes

Word Count: 98

Rating: K

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Naboo

Characters/Pairings: A Citizen of Naboo (and some familiar faces)

_...Now, in a galaxy far, far away..._

**Three Heroes**

Theed has long ago outgrown it's walls, and you cross the border between the new city and the old. There, in a garden near the palace, is a statue carved of smooth black stone, three figures with lightsabers raised, facing inward toward an imaginary foe.

Their names have long since been forgotten; the Jedi are remembered as an Order rather than as individuals. Still, their presences call to you. Your gaze falls on the form of the Zabrak, slightly separated from his human companions. He, with his proud bearing, must have been the one who vanquished the Sith.


	122. Consolation

**Word Count: 111 (…I know)**

**Genre: Drama? Portentous? **

**Rating: K **

**Characters: Obi-Wan, etc.

* * *

**

**Consolation**

"I am sorry for your loss."

Obi-Wan looked up from the medcenter bed. His shoulder ached, and blisters on his hands stung. His voice did not want to raise from the choked half-whisper he had given Qui-Gon.

"He served the Force well. Is that…the correct phrase?" said the visitor.

"Not quite."

"I am sorry. If there is anything I can do…"

"I'll be fine." He turned onto his less-aching side. "I apologize for my rudeness, Sena—excuse me, Chancellor."

"It is quite alright. Anything you need, Obi-Wan. I could give young Anakin a tour of the senate rotunda, acclimate him to the Republic. Whatever you would like. Have a good rest."


	123. Growing Up

**Word Count: 96**

**Rating: K**

**Genre: Introspective**

**Characters: Riyo Chuchi (little blue senator from the Clone Wars TV show) **

Growing Up

Riyo never understood why beings her age talked about "what they want to be when they grow up'. For senators, there was no waiting.

When people looked at her they saw how young she was. But many senators spent their formative years bustling between Coruscant and their homeworld. She knew that when the public watched holovids of the great arena and saw childish, coiffed heads beside the adult ones, they would see the young senators not as a sign of inexperience, but of beings learning as they lived. Beings, like the Jedi, fostered by the Republic.


	124. The Beauty All Around

**Word Count: 100**

**Genre: General**

**Rating: K**

**Characters: an OC Gungan scholar**

**The Beauty All Around**

There is beauty all around us. We breathe it in; we kick with our feet and move through it. But the Naboo do not understand that. Their cities are made to stand once and be destroyed, while our statues are made to look beautiful even as they become ruins, to retain their use even as they are ignored. This is why we and the Naboo do not get along, even though the elders say it is pride or ignorance or a simple difference in language which causes the rift. I hope that a common enemy will help heal us both.


	125. For The Good

**Word Count: 300**

**Genre: Drama/Creepy**

**Rating: K+**

**Characters: Cad Bane, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace Windu, Ahsoka **

(_This is based on Bane's interrogation in the Clone Wars television episode "Children of the Force". Three drabbles under one title, since we've been quiet so long, and since…they go together.) _

For The Good

I.

Ahsoka studies their backs, not sure that she will be able to meet their eyes.

Master Windu's hulking frame, Master Obi-Wan's armor plating, Anakin shaking beneath his dark layers. With regret? No. With anger at Bane, whose knotty blue hands jump and twitch on the table.

How could the Jedi do this? They are using the Force as a weapon. But the information he had would save _children!_ For that, Ahsoka would stand for this torture, would follow through on the rescue mission it enabled.

But she would not meet Anakin's eyes.

II.

All the techniques Bane learned—imagining walls as thick as starship hulls, distancing himself from small thoughts, focusing on the idea of his own name—does not prepare him for what the Force really is when it is turned on him like searchlights by the three Jedi. It is not a thing to be sued, for Cad Bane, but one that uses him, binds him, suffocates him, lays siege to his defenses and leaves what is left of him dry.

His surrender is a cool drink after exhausting heat.

He will demand more credits to confront Jedi again.

III.

_Jedi should not use the Force for personal gain._ Obi-Wan remembers this from so long ago. But in the cloying Tatooine air he remembers Qui-Gon trying to influence Watto's mind instead of ordering Huttese credits from the Republic exchange offices. He remembers Master Windu's rockhard resolve, and Anakin as instinctive and destructive as a krayt dragon, and Obi-Wan remembers how he was swept up with them in what became the retrieval of information rather than the torture of a man.

His Masters taught him that rules were soft around the edges.

He looks into the stormtrooper's black lenses and says "These aren't the droids you're looking for."


	126. Lachrymosa

**Word Count: **292

**Genre: **tragedy/introspection/romance-ish

**Rating: **K

**Characters: **The recurring OC Asha Scarsi and Ferus Olin. This was a present to ArgenteusDraco, who wanted these two after Order 66; thus the inconsiderate length. Needless to say it's technical part of the 'Voice of the Shadows' universe.

Lachrymosa

There are days when she could die in music, could let it take her from the world, and there are days when she sees him and remembers to live.

But he is also empty flimsi, waiting for the notes to give it form, and so she tries to write in slides and sixteenth notes, the light of him, the indestructible _interest _he invokes in her.

She shakes herself back to the present, reminds herself that she's here for business, she's here to see if his attempt to help the few remaining Jedi could survive.

She hasn't seen him in so long; so much has skirled beneath the bridge of her mind since then, little rippling things standing out because the big tidal things (the Order gone, Skywalker's light turned inside out, he's a black hole now) are too big. Instead she remembers the friendships that died of attrition and the triangles inked on Kate's arms that she feared, for one heart-shocking moment, were permanent. The galaxy has changed, from trills and light to dark beats that seem to follow her and roost behind her eyes like the hawkbats in the poem that ended with "nevermore". But he hasn't changed much; same voice, same hair and eyes and movements. Of course he's older now, they both are; they have titles now, and those define them instead of things like "he's always studying" and "she speaks in music" whispered in the Temple halls. They haven't seen one another in so long that she thinks he must have forgotten her, he must have moved on and on and not be the same melody any more. Except, "Asha," he says, and his Force presence washes over her, familiar as notes, and they haven't changed at all.


	127. Factions

**Word Count: **100

**Genre: ** I have given up separating things into genres

**Rating: **K

**Characters: **a Jedi sniper

Factions

They chose him when he was made Padawan; gave him private lessons in striking from afar and set him up among the spires to watch the city flow by. The snipers guarded the temple from….what? Who would attack? Sitting and waiting for an enemy to attack on sight seemed so unlike the Jedi ideals of compassion and peace.

But as he got older and began to be able to predict the patterns of traffic and emotions of Coruscant, he realized that maybe the snipers were posted around the Temple not to fight attackers, but so that no one _would _attack.


	128. I See You Mourning

**Word Count: **99

**Genre: ** We will write about main characters again one day I promise. Also, requests are always open.

**Rating: **K

**Characters: **Boga, speaking to Obi-Wan after her apparent death

I See You Mourning

I see you mourning.

Wet-dripping, shaking off pain like droplets I look up and see your furred head bent. I'm late; you're gone. But your scent lingers sadness-tinged, the scent of a packmate torn away clinging to the rocks where you stood, and body language is so linked to smell for us, for the dragons. We will be all right. I feel the call of sun-warmed ledges and hatchlings tumbling in the nests. You will feel the call of sunlight also, and will shake off the metal scent that hangs over the battles your kind has over its territory.


	129. Line of Sight

**Word Count: **95

**Genre: ** memory, droid-angst (?)

**Rating: **K

**Characters: **R2-D2, Anakin Skywalker

**Note: **As requested by **anakinpadmekenobi**, here is "R2 remembers Anakin".

* * *

Line of Sight 

The first time we met you weren't much taller than I am, and you looked at me like I was as much a person ("_I'm not a slave, I'm a person, and I have a name!") _as you were. You grew, but you would always look down, always count me in. And then on Mustafar your eyes were only looking at Padmé (you even looked at me during the wedding, smiling at your secret-keeper!) , and I remember your boots and the dark cloth of your tunic as you swept past, but not your eyes.


	130. Choices

**W**ord Count: 80

**G**enre: introspection

**C**haracters: Count Dooku and his teachers

**R**ating: K

* * *

_Choices_

"No, you've _lost control_," Yoda said as Dooku left the fighting floor with his robes sticking to his sweat-cold skin. Sidious, though, always praises him for the rage that feels so useful to Dooku.

"Your hate makes you strong," Sidious says. "Use it."

And so, for Dooku, the choice that matters is not really the one between the dark side and the light side, but rather the one between praise and insult.

Put that way, the choice is much easier.


	131. Time Enough To Wait

**W**ord Count: 98

**G**enre: eh I've given up on taking these "genre" things seriously

**C**haracters: Durge

**R**ating: K

**Requested by **Riptor25 of deviantArt, who wanting something about Durge from the Clone Wars and how he could hibernate for thousands of years.

* * *

_Time Enough To Wait  
_

The Gen'Dai are an old species. There are older; the Duros, the Rakatans, even the Zabrak may claim more years since they produced their first artist. But the Gen'Dai did not grow up as the dominant race of their world; they struggled to evolve. They learned to hide and sleep, to distend into parts. This is why Gen'Dai think in millennia.

Another being might have been confused, disheartened, or mellowed by the long hibernation in which Durge slept and built himself up sinew by muscle by bone. Not a Gen'Dai, though; he awoke with the revenge of centuries.


	132. Variety

**W**ord Count: 96

**G**enre: aaawwww factor

**C**haracters: Yoda, an OC Padawan

**R**ating: K

**Requested by **IrishPirateQueen of deviantArt, who wanted something about Nessie, her Kaleesh OC, when she was training with Yoda as a child. The fact that Nessie tried to alter her appearance to look more human was one of the most interesting things about her.

* * *

_Variety _

It isn't considered _impolite _to ask someone's species. It's just assumed no one can know all of them. Yoda sees the multitude of species as just another proof of life's richness.

He kneels down beside the Kaleesh child and asks what's wrong.

She says, "I don't look like the others." She files her claws together, works a fingertip around the bottom of one tusk.

"Worry not," Yoda says, and holds out a hand. He gives her time to look at her scaled brown palm pressed against his wrinkled green one before pulling her to her feet.


	133. Alive at Heart

**W**ord Count: 99

**G**enre: bitter sweet reminiscence

**C**haracters: Obi-Wan

**R**ating: K

**Requested by **I-pondered of deviantArt, who wanted "Obi-Wan's past loves coming back to haunt him."

* * *

_Alive at Heart _

When the war grew long and dull with the sound of siege in the distance, Obi-Wan would drift off to sleep beneath a tarp or his cloak and not be able to keep from wondering what she would do in his place. Satine, the one whose only weapon negated other weapons, would never want to be here in this inevitable wartime. Siri, though—he bet she'd be trying to smile and wiping dirt off her face and going to see who was still alive.

_I'm still alive_, he wanted to tell her. _A lot has changed. That has not. _


	134. Tech

**W**ord Count: 87

**G**enre: who knows

**C**haracters: Cad Bane

**R**ating: K

**Requested by **IrishPirateQueen of deviantArt, who I'm pretty sure wanted Cad Bane/OC and isn't getting it. Instead, here's my continued fascination with that information extraction scene.

* * *

_Tech _

Cad Bane doesn't believe in the superiority of the Jedi. This is why he is calm around them, why he can smile and lean around them. With his jetboots and hypnogazer and an acting ability worth as much as a mindtrick or a Force bond when trying to get someone to trust you, he has no need for their magics.

That is why Kenobi and Skywalker forcing themselves into his mind scares him. He knows, in that moment, that have one thing he doesn't have: true mercilessness.


	135. Silent Prophecy

**W**ord Count: too many

**G**enre: angst/foreshadowing

**C**haracters: Bultar Swan, Darth Vader

**R**ating: T

**Requested by **DarthSkyGirl of deviantArt. I thought I didn't know much about Bultar Swan until I realized that I had in fact read the comic in which she dies (killed by Koffi Arana, fellow Jedi) and that there was this nifty OT metaphor. I hope this makes as much sense to you guys as it does to me, now being the middle of the night.

* * *

_Silent Prophecy _

_ Was I wrong? _Bultar thinks as she lays on the ground feeling death-numbness and shock-numbness shutter the burning pain of her lightsaber wound from either side. She would kill neither Vader nor Arana, and so a Jedi had done literally what they all had done metaphorically; sacrificed his own morals to fight the dark.

_ Was it worth it?_ The Force sparks inside her like her wound. 

It shows her the blurred, dream-real image of a boy sparing Vader's life. Then the Dark Lord turns and saves him from death-spark, death-pain, and so Bultar Swan's silent prophecy is fulfilled.

Pity is worth all its pain.


	136. Beskar

**W**ord Count: 201

**G**enre: friendship

**C**haracters: OCs; see "requested by" bit.

**R**ating: K

**Requested by **foxsword of deviantArt, with whom I have had a lot of awesome conversations. She requested that I write about two characters whose story I've been following for a while, and it was really cool to be able to step into their world (even if I tried really hard not to go over the 100 word limit (failed) and not to go off on a huge story arc about what they're doing spying on an Imperial (succeeded). So here is Prymax, Mandalorian ex-Jedi, and Alanti, mercenary and (probably) street rat on Coruscant during Order 66. This was supposed to be a pairing story, but...mostly isn't.

This is the end of the dA requests. You might not see many more of these from me since I've been writing for another fandom lately. But the tides may change. Thanks to everybody who stuck around all this time!

* * *

_Beskar _

"Look. Heat signature a fourth of the way up."

He took his helmet off and shook out his black hair as he handed it to her. The Mando metal was heavier and warmer than she expected, and when she put it on the helmet was far too big, sitting low on her shoulders.

The view through the t-visor was clearer than she expected, but ringed with sigils and readings. She could see how to toggle heat, ultraviolet, how to tag locations and spot weapons signatures. The whole world was overlaid with a map.

She turned to look at him and an bar in the corner of her vision blossomed with information. Height, weight, _Kiffar, _little spots of glow where blasters and grenades were strapped to his belt and back. All statistics and readouts.

He might be numbers and a species and _Jedi _ to the Empire, but to her, he was a friend. A complete picture.

She looked back at their destination and honed in on the heatspike—with her own vision; she couldn't quite figure out how to get the helmet to zoom. "You're right. There's the informant."

He rapped on the side of the _beskar. _"That's our barve. Let's go."


	137. Love and Other PassFail Things

**Genre: **Anidala

**Rating: **K

**Characters: **Anakin, Padme, Ahsoka

**Note **that, although I've had this dialogue in my head and Word document for ages, this one is inspired by _Mathematica_'s recent renaissance. It might also be worth noting that until further notice "I" means skywalker05- ArgenteusDraco is on hiatus.

* * *

_Love and Other Pass/Fail Things_

She used to ask him a lot of questions. "How do we know what the Force wants for us?" "Why would the Trade Federation blockade this planet?" Sometimes he would answer and sometimes he would say "Snips, you ask too many questions", and she would stand back, quiet, a good Padawan. Sometimes he would have to say "You just have to _sense_ it." It was hard to put the Force into words. People's presence defied description, lacking topography like a planed cheek or a mole or a marking. So she would ask, and sometimes he would answer.

Once, he stood watching Senator Amidala walk away, the train of her robe purple like royalty, and the Force in him crowed loud and secretive and did not touch his expression or his eyes. Ahsoka shivered as if her montrals had been touched by a wind.

"What was that?"

He did not look at her. "A test."


	138. One of Many Prophecies

**Based on: **the Clone Wars episode "Assassin"**  
**

**Genre: **Tragedy**  
**

**Rated: **K+**  
**

**Characters: **Ahsoka, Padme

* * *

_One of Many Prophecies_

She has been running forever. Her mind knows that once she sat cross-legged on the meditation chair in Yoda's sanctum and breathed in the cool, clean air and felt safe, but her body tells her otherwise. These nails have always had dirt under them. This body has always been primed like a predator, knowing the world with all seven senses (eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, Force, echoes).

But when she skids to a stop in the dirt with the clones somewhere in the night-dark and fog-dark behind her and is struck with a vision, it all comes back. This is not prescience; it is present, and Padme is dying, torn in half by the birth and by Anakin's betrayal—

And Ahsoka remembers, as the strings of vision unwind from around her hands and she brushes them away, another day, long ago, when she sensed something in the future and thought she knew what it meant.

Stalking among cloud-shrouded trees in Ahsoka's vision, Aurra Sing said, "She will die, and there's nothing you can do."At the time, it made sense. Aurra would try to assassinate Padme at the speech the senator was making, and there _ was_ something Ahsoka could do.

They'd narrowly escaped that day, and Ahsoka had thought the prophecy broken.

But now as she stood on some Force-forsaken world (or maybe it was simply the Order that was forsaken) , she heard the words again and heard Padme die, far away, bringing all the memories of their friendship and the tough, glorious, _easy _fights of the Clone Wars back, and Ahsoka shivered in the sweat of her exertion.

_She will die, and there's nothing you can do. _


	139. Trinity

**Based on: **the Clone Wars episode "Overlords"**  
**

**Genre: **Introspection**  
**

**Rated: **K**  
**

**Characters: **Ahsoka

**Note** that this collection has sortof become the repository for all of skywalker05's "let's make Clone Wars make sense" fanfics. I'm not sure if there's actually a Clone Wars section on this site, but there doesn't seem to be much interest in it so it would be awesome if reviewers could spread the word and help people find this story and me find good TCW fic.

* * *

_Trinity  
_

Ahsoka shifted nervously, wondering whether Yoda had decided on purpose that the futons in his meditation chamber would have no backs so that you'd be uncomfortable if you didn't sit quite right. The false leather creaked beneath her.

They sat in a rough circle for the debriefing: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Ahsoka, with the dirt of the most alien world she had ever been on still caked on her boots. She listened, while the others confessed their visions. That was what Jedi debriefings were for; honesty, revealing oneself in order to be selfless, letting the past go.

She listened to her elders tell their nightmares. Obi-Wan saw his master, the venerable Qui-Gon she had heard of so many times in whispers and sidelong glances. Anakin saw his master; the mother he had left behind, whose guilt still took him in wracks and Force-waves only someone with a bond to him could feel.

And Ahsoka told her story. She didn't understand or remember all the words the woman with the full headtails and her markings on her cheeks had said, but retelling it felt like the release it was supposed to. In the back of her head she was thinking something else, maybe some remnant thought of the Son.

_Obi-Wan saw Qui-Gon. Anakin saw his mother, his master in his Master's stead. I saw myself._

_ I am my own Master. _


	140. Take Your Place At My Side

**Based on: **the Clone Wars episode "Overlords"**  
**

**Genre:** OT/PT clash**  
**

**Rated: **K**+  
**

**Characters: **Vader, Luke

* * *

_Take Your Place At My Side  
_

The gantry creaked beneath durasteel weight. Luke Skywalker proved in the blood and wrist bone clutched to his dirty sand-colored jacket that he was no machine, and for a moment, standing above this young hero, Darth Vader caught the smells of sun and skin carried upward through the Cloud City shaft. A memory came of days long ago and lightsaber-lit, when Obi-Wan had traveled across a mysterious land with a boy and a girl by his side. These three Jedi had discovered things, there. The dark side and the light side had fallen to their knees before the One Who Refused To Be Chosen. Anakin had not thought that he would stay in that place. He had thought that prophecy, like slave shackles, could not hold him.

Darth Vader said, "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father," and he was not entirely sure what had happened to him himself—

Maybe Obi-Wan knew—

Luke said, "He told me _enough. _He told me _you killed him._"

And Anakin finally took his place as the Father.


	141. Mercy Mission

**Based on: **the Clone Wars episode "Mercy Mission"**  
**

**Genre:** OT/PT clash, introspection**  
**

**Rated: **K**  
**

**Characters: **C-3P0, Leia

**Note: **Hi! I'm not dead! It's been a while since anything in Star Wars has really compelled me to write. I established really strong relationships with some of the characters, especially Luke, in middle school. Almost ten years later I'm not quite in a place to identify with them any more, and it's been strange to realize that. I dislike the writing on Clone Wars to the extent that I find it almost insulting that there are so many brilliant people out here writing fanfic for free. However, the occasional Clone Wars episode produces something I want to fic about.

Writing Leia is a bit of a mystery to me.

* * *

_Mercy Mission_

Leia idly patted 3PO on the shoulder as she looked around at the huge, bronzy tree trunks, the dancing crowds of Ewoks, and the wavering orange firelight. The air tasted piney; the Death Star was lurking out there somewhere like an unnatural secondary moon. Fire-heat washed against her cheeks and lent a strange clarity to thoughts of Luke, Han, and the distant Rebels. She had told Luke to run.

The protocol droid seemed to feel no need to react to her touch, but when she withdrew it he looked at her with brightening, flat eyes and a nervous lift of his shoulders. "Are you...concerned, princess?"

"It's fine, 3PO."

He seemed content to be a good armrest, even eager to improve in that capacity. His elbows lifted. "I seem to have been...distracted. I was trying to recall a word."

Leia tipped her head. "What word? Don't droids have...perfect memories?"

"Yes, but I was unsure whether it was appropriate and needed to sort through a succession of related languages that I have not accessed in some time."

"So what was it?"

"Do you know the word...well, with humans it's probably not needed very often. But in the Asfaraj system of theololottery, their word "shargani" means, 'to feel like you have represented a deity...more than once'. I am sorry princess, this is probably not very common."

"Common is certainly not what I would call it."

"Well, I find myself feeling..." He gestured out at the Ewoks and the fires. "Shargani."

"Well, if we ever end up in another situation like this, don't hesitate to feel it again."

"I just can't recall where I would have...been a god before."

"Think about it, 3PO." Leia started to move along the balcony toward the stairway. Han and Luke were down there, and she had come too close just not to telling 3PO to run away too. _Escape Vader, this is not your destiny, stay safe. If someone says they will kill you if you're not a god, throw sand on your head and make sure it looks like you're not one, because you can't become a deity on command._

Leia had loved many beings, but never enough, or fearfully enough, to tell them to run away from a fight. If C-3PO's memory had been wiped, he wouldn't be able to get the last time he had been a god back. A fussy, over-intelligent droid bumbling through a forest on the eve of battle, though, needed something to occupy him.

She said, "Maybe it will come to you," and started down the stairs.


	142. Shadow

**Based on:** the Clone Wars episode "Shadow Warrior"

**Genre:** dark!Padme / AU / not actually a drabble

**Rated:** T

**Characters:** Padme/Anakin, Grievous

**Notes: **Every time I come back to Star Wars fic is strange these days. The fact that I'm writing about Padme is just one more layer of weird. Here's another Clone Wars drabble, except it got just _almost _long enough to post by itself. The last part of this fic got very pointed about both the problems I have with Padme (or most heroines) in canon (namely that she never shows any fear, and therefore isn't relateable), and the problems that can happen when someone identifies _too much _with their own weaknesses.

* * *

_Shadow _

She was ushered in by a Gungan guard with elaborate, purple rings in his ears. The cell was dark; she needed to push through ankle-high water to pass the door. Maybe Gungans thought it was more comfortable this swampy way: maybe for them, the dry land in the hasty prisoner-of-war camp was the threatening environment. That, or it was just hard to find solid ground here.

General Grievous was tied in the corner, the spearhaft still jammed under his chest plate and preventing his head from turning. Ropes tied around hooks in the wall secured both ends of the spear, creating a strange, diagonal barrier that the cyborg leaned and pushed against. All the pushing he did just leaned the spear further into his neck, parting thin strands of cord behind where the ears would be on a human, and when Grievous looked up at Padme there was watery pain and fear in his eyes as well as the livid hate she knew so well.

She thinks, _maybe he knows. Maybe Dooku and the Seperatist Council are keeping it from everyone because it's only me they need to manipulate it with right now, but maybe they know that Anakin and I-_

Jar Jar and Tarpals had advised her to trade Grievous for Anakin, and now Grievous did not speak. She wondered whether it was because the general knew his words would be used against him, or if the cyborg simply couldn't get past his animalistic rage. Immediately she chided herself for the thought: Grievous was a sentient being, a prisoner of war. He shouldn't still be nearly crucified in this dank cell.

(The Gungan guard was still watching her. Did he know about Anakin? About the marriage? Maybe at the end of this everyone would. If Padme traded Grievous in she would show the galaxy the sacrifices she was willing to make for this _single Jedi..._

What if it was Obi-Wan out there? What if it was Ahsoka, or Aayla?

But it was Anakin.)

The media followed Padme so much already. The things she had found in the gossip vids about her, about the time she spent under Anakin's watch, or even Obi-Wan's...her handmaids tried to protect her but even gossip was displayed on building-sized holos on Coruscant. She was made into the kind of person who looks at a whole city and thinks _"I think it sees me? I think it wants me?" _That was a horrified soul.

Maybe everyone knew already. If she did not trade for Anakin, that would prove that she could not put duty before love.

Jar Jar moved quietly to her side, flippered feet splashing. Grievous shook in his shackles.

"Whatta we do with him, misses Padme?"

"Move him to somewhere where he's less likely to rust." She put on her senator voice, her paint-and-feathers mask. "We will not trade."

"B-but, Ani..."

"Is a Jedi. He will do his duty." _Or escape,_ Padme thought ruefully. "Leave me, Jar Jar. There's nothing more to see here."

Jar Jar's luminous eyes looked even more uncertain that usual. "The guards cannot leave the door."

There were two of them, holding feather-bedecked spears.

Padme said, "They don't need to. Please."

Jar Jar looked worried, and that was inexplicably insulting. Padme could take care of herself. He dipped his head and splashed out, only turning his back at the last moment.

Padme thought, _I can't go to the dark side, Anakin. The Force can't even see me._

_ All I can do is take revenge. _

When she was alone with Grievous she paced through the muck toward the cyborg hanging on the wall, and he pulled at his bonds but did not speak to her. He couldn't do too much pulling either, when the stake was bisecting his center of gravity.

Padme said, "You took so much from me."

"And what of the things your Republic took from me?" said Grievous in a moment of coherence, and Padme wondered what his story was. It was easy to imagine Dooku's servants as mindless warriors full of rage, and if much of the intelligence on Ventress and Grievous and Darth Maul was accurate, that was true. Dooku or Darth Sidious liked to take the personality and motive away from their servants. For some reason, autonomy offended the Sith.

But Grievous had had a motive once.

Padme unclipped her blaster from her belt and stroked the small, silver gun. Of course the Gungans and the Jedi had allowed her to keep it: she was on their side after all, and she was a rational, experienced diplomat.

Anakin always spoke of pressure from the Jedi to control his emotions. What emotions should be controlled and what ones should be embraced as not discussed: the Council preached peace and reverence in everything, and Obi-Wan lived that. It wasn't for everyone, though, to discipline the mind and wear monks' robes. It couldn't be possible that all teachings would take with all Jedi.

But she wasn't bound by these codes. The Seperatists could keep or kill Anakin as they wished, maybe leave him in a prison for the duration of the war. They would leave Naboo. One more planet would know peace, and that counted as a Republic victory. Anakin would understand the tactical role he must play. He understood the sacrifices.

(And now no one will know about their marriage. No one will say _she spared him because she loved him, obviously, look you can see it in her eyes.) _

Padme, though, well, she wasn't a Jedi. She was just a senator who was pulled into the war because she knew how to fight, and because her friends were in the war and she had to learn what they're going through or else she would go mad.

Anakin would suffer no matter what she did.

She was just a little girl.

Padme shoved the muzzle of the tiny blaster into Grievous' ribcage and pulled the trigger. She shot him in the eye for good measure afterward but she was pretty sure the first shot took care of all the guts.


	143. Brothers

**Based on:** the upcoming Clone Wars episodes

**Genre:** dark

**Rated:** T

**Characters:** Darth Maul, Savage Oppress

**Notes: **It's really, really awesome to be writing Darth Maul again. I'm a bit rusty and having to re-learn him but I may start posting more stuff about him and Savage on my other profile, so check out skywalker05 if you want all the latest.

* * *

_Brothers  
_

Darth Maul looks up at the creature that is calling itself his brother.

He sees black stripes on a yellow face; hooked, tan horns; orange eyes. He sees black armor like the shell of a turtle. This must be another animal, come to fight Maul for his nest. Maul shivers all over, readying himself to get up. He arcs like a cat. He tastes the air with his teeth and his tongue. It smells like ashes and fire, but it always does. Maybe, somewhere, there's the tang of speeder exhaust from above, and something electrical.

The creature talks to him. The voice is deep, and the words, garbled. It has shoved its way into his den, and sniffed while it looked at his scrap metal and his fire and his drawings. It is a big, wide-shouldered creature.

Maul has trouble with words sometimes. He remembers that they used to be easy for him, but now they seem to stick and repeat instead of forming into new shapes quickly. The shapes of letters seem to have color and sound of their own.

_("Years...and years...and years...")_

The creature that calls itself his brother is wearing a blue stone on a leather cord around its neck. If Maul grabbed the cord the necklace would cut into the creature's skin hard enough to hurt it and whip its head forward, at which point Maul could headbutt or bite or scratch or run. Anything.

The creature is talking again, but it doesn't quite feel real. It's as real as the rat corpse in the alley, the hot blood Maul shifted through to find the meat. It's as real as the dirt underneath his fingernails and in the gear embedded in his right thigh. (He will have to fix that leg soon. Things are rusting. He will sort through his pile of metal and make it work again.)

Sometimes, the drawings on the walls are the realest things to him. He makes them with animal blood or clumps of carbon he pulls from the fire. Pictures are simple. Just lines and places with no lines.

The stranger is talking. Maul is deciding whether to kill it or to draw the lines painted on its face on the walls in order to make it feel more real.


	144. My Brother's Keeper

**Based on:** tumblr prompts (Skywalker05 is known as completelysane on tumblr, by the way, and does a lot of writing there nowadays.

**Genre:** dialogue

**Rated:** K+

**Characters:** Darth Maul

* * *

_my brother's keeper_

Savage hesitated when he talked about Mother Talzin, so that Maul knew the two had been both more and less than tribe-kin before Maul had arrived to change them even more.

"You don't trust her," he said as he sat with his hands between his knees in their stolen starship, and his brother turned his back on him.

"No. She….changed me."

Maul snorted, raised one hand palm-up to indicate his metal limbs.

"Not in the same way as you." Savage's voice was gruff and his thick shoulders hunched. "Not quite. It is hard for me to remember but there was a third brother, and he…tried to protect me."

"You do not need protection."

"No, but…" Savage turned around, his orange eyes burning. They were waterier than Maul's, and wider; less suited to the acrid, dry air of Lotho Minor and far too willing to give away emotion in the regulated atmosphere of the ship. "He was my brother."

Maul cocked his head.

Savage gestured with a long-nailed hand. "Do you understand that? They say we are kin. But you…" he blinked. "Don't fight like a Zabrak."

Darth Maul shrugged, not sure what else he would fight like. Even spidery, even with his memories blurred, he could be only himself. Savage's questions were irrelevant to him.

"I was the older brother," Savage said. "He was my duty."

"Am I older still?" Maul asked.

"Do you not remember your childhood?"

"I remember Darth Sidious."

"Then I don't know," Savage said. "But you won't take the blame for protecting us all." He was, perhaps, trying to sound kind, but Maul had never known the youngest brother, and had very rarely had anyone he needed to protect.

"No," said Maul. "I will not."


	145. Be Not Afraid

**Based on:** tumblr prompts

**Genre:** cyborgs

**Rated:** K+

**Characters:** Darth Maul

* * *

_be not afraid  
_

When Darth Maul thinks back on his time in the cave he thinks that he can still feel mechanical legs creaking around him and a heavy body dragging on the floor. He rebuilt himself from black plates and used the bones and teeth of animals for his joints. He worked oil and fat into his engines the same, with no particular thought for practicality or speed. He did not need to walk streets because he was here in this rusting red land and he would be here forever, every minute the future and all other futures unthought of, living and killing.

But when he is revived and resuscitated and his memory returned to him, he finds that the spidery legs he made were a cage. They frighten him with their messy unwillingness to move together, and thinking of them attached to the remnants of his body makes it all worse. He becomes, in quick moments that are not relevant to the future(s), afraid of himself.

But he always kept fear close to him, even closer than the steel set into his skin, and he knows how to make it a good companion.


	146. Powers and Principalities

**Based On:**The Clone Wars: The Lawless

**Rated: **K+

**Characters: **Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Satine Kryze

* * *

_Powers and Principalities  
_

The thing with hate is you can't let it stay.

Obi-Wan breathes his hate out in one blue moment. Darth Maul is standing over his shoulder with his eyes burning, and Satine is in front of him bereft of her headdress of state and her life. Qui-Gon's death felt like this.

It would be so easy to hate Darth Maul. It would be so lovely.

Satine speaks and Obi-Wan lets the words flow out of him. "I will always love you." He will need to fight after this, to be ready. He draws what strength he can from the feverish heat of her cheek and looks up. The Force clears his thoughts out, backing and distracting him with a vision of stars and cloudy nebulas.

The thing with love is you can't let it stay.


	147. Eminent

**Based On:**The Clone Wars: Eminence and The Lawless

**Rated: **K+

**Characters: **Darth Maul, Savage Oppress, Pre Viszla

* * *

_Eminent  
_

You are cold, and you are dreaming.

You can feel the lip of a cup of tea under your hands. The Force swirls, prophetic, and you do not know when you are, although the where is obvious from the cold and the silence of dead starship engines. The Force tells you that someone is waiting for you. Someone is watching, in the cold of space. You can sense them, and their sense prickles on your skin and shakes the ice.

You can feel the weight of the eyes on your eyes, the crackling rime on your eyelashes. Savage is sitting in the chair opposite you, one hand tucked into his tunic, the wound of his other arm frozen over.

"Might we die here, brother?"

You grunt, sigh, do not know what noises you wish to make to answer such an irrelevant question. Death will come or it will not. There are still people outside.

"Stay still." You breathe in again, shift your knees. Still half-expecting the heavy arachnid chatter of your metal limbs from Lotho Minor. You wonder where the witches are, which is not the same as wondering where your family is. You smell in the Force-rich strangers about to break down your door.

The dark side sweeps through you, and in the ache and the ice there is something familiar. Kenobi was here? Is/will be here? He has something to do with the beings in front of you, who clatter into the hold. You start to feel yourself shivering - in what terrible moment had you stopped? - as you try to reach out to your brother. (Consoling your apprentice is not something you learned from Sidious.) So cold even the air flakes. But these intruder-saviors in their masks reek of Obi-Wan and Sidious. You blink up at them, then let your eyes close again under the sleepy weight of the cold. You are reassured. It isn't the cold and pain and worry that accompanies you into the dark of unconsciousness: it is the Force.


	148. Some must be coerced into freedom

Darth Sidious has emerged from Senator Palpatine like a soul stepping out of a body, and put on Emperor Palpatine as a cloak.

It is delicious to have his identity revealed: in ridding the galaxy of the Jedi he is also ridding it of a particular blind brand of stupidity. The Jedi had proven their own uselessness, day after day that they had not found him, and now everyone in the galaxy will know their mistake except the Jedi themselves.

Sidious looks down at the last Jedi. Darth Vader, his name so new on Sidious' and Anakin's tongues although it has waited in Sidious' mind for long, dark years, stewing in the dusty corners of his brain. A thick sheet of plasteel separates Sidious from the medical droids and their gristly work around the darkened table and lumpen machinery of the secret hospital.

The operating room is sterile, and Sidious does not wish to contaminate it with his presence: he could, if he wished, meditate for some time, especially here under the dark shroud of Coruscant, and kill all the living things in his skin and on his breath in a feat of alchemy Darth Plagueis would find unattainably mysterious. But he does not.

Darth Sidious would have time for that. Darth Sidious has come to the end of his prophecy, has returned and is riding around the world on a pale horse.

Palpatine, though, has an empire with wounds to salve. Palpatine has paperwork.

He wanted to wait for something, though. He wanted to watch this.

The medical droid turns toward him when it happens, to hold the tongs over a sealed trash bin. As the bin irises open Sidious sees the little silver box in the grip of the tongs, a mechanism as small as a finger bone. Sidious closes his eyes for a moment, his scarred, winkled face loathe to move to smile.

That's it, though. That's the remote detonator that has been between muscles in Anakin Skywalker's neck for ten years, and now Darth Vader is free.


End file.
